This dissertation examines the trends of household energy consumption in China during two recent decades and explores socio-economic factors, such as household wealth, urbanization, and lifestyle changes, that influenced the changes. At the national and multi-regional level, structural decomposition analysis of input-output tables is used to calculate and analyze indirect energy use for urban and rural households. This approach enables examination of the influence of key macroeconomic factors of the changes in household indirect energy consumption in a shift share fashion. At the household level, this dissertation contrasts the lifestyles of urban households, rural households, and rural-to-urban migrants based on survey data from the Chinese Household Income Projects. The consumer lifestyle approach is used to link household indirect energy use to household expenditures and multivariate analysis is used to explore key factors affecting indirect energy use at the household level. Structural decomposition analysis indicates that household consumption mainly drove the rise of indirect energy use while energy efficiency improvements in production technology offset most of the increment. Population growth and urbanization played an important role in driving up indirect energy use between 1987 and 2007. Rapid urbanization and population migration from hinterland to coastal regions contributed heavily to regional differences in the rise of household indirect energy use across China. At the household level, household indirect energy use is affected in a statistically significant manner by climate, income, household size, and housing floor area. Several policy recommendations follow from this. First, China should further encourage renewable energy and promote clean-coal technologies in electric power generation. This is particularly important as household move from coal and other fuels toward electricity usage. For space heating, China should gradually switch from coal to natural gas and liberalize its central heating market. Second, China should adopt stringent energy efficiency standards for home appliances and promote highly efficient products by labeling, offering subsidies, tax credits, or low interest loans to households to encourage their use. Last, China seriously needs to consider securing a supply of energy that is sufficient to meet it rapidly rising household demand for energy.

This book is primarily based on data from the third analysis of domestic energy consumption, and it combines the conclusive summarizes from the previous two investigations. The book sets out to extend the spatial dimension of the research to a global one and discusses future development of domestic energy consumption from a global perspective. Additionally, the book seeks to discover general rules and diversity features via comparison, domestic vs. global. Future predictions via observations and summaries of history are provided for the reader in this volume as well. The studies in this volume not only provide a basic and supportive index for academic research, but also provide readers with a concrete sketch for people to understand energy use in their day-to-day lives, and it provides policy makers with fundamental, need-to-know data.

This book presents a succinct overview of research on China's Energy Efficiency as studied by the Center for Energy & Environmental Policy Research (CEEP), Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). Energy efficiency, linking energy supply, demand and market, is crucial to the world's energy development. China consumes one fourth of the world's energy currently, however its per capital consumption is no more than half of that in OECD countries. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the situation of China's energy development, proposes and summarizes the methodologies of energy efficiency measurement, and uses these methods to analyze the energy consumption at sectoral and provincial level, the impacts of economic structure on the energy macro-efficiency, the price elasticity of oil demand, and energy efficiency policies simulations. The book provides scientific support for researchers and policy makers dealing with energy efficiency.

The New Geographies of Energy: Assessment and Analysis of Critical Landscapes is a pioneering collection of new geographic scholarship. It examines such vitally important research topics as energy dilemmas of the United States, large trends and patterns of energy consumption including China’s role, "peak oil", energy poverty, and ethanol and other renewable energy sourcing. The book offers advances in key emerging areas of energy research, each distinguished in the following sections: (i) geographic approaches to energy modeling and assessment; (ii) fossil fuel landscapes; (iii) the landscapes of renewable energy; (iv) landscapes of energy consumption; and (v) an overview of the new geographies of energy (Karl Zimmerer, Annals Nature-Society and Energy issue editor) and an essay on America’s oil dependency (Vaclav Smil, renowned energy geographer). In addition there is a specially commissioned book review. This book was published as a special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

This book forges a link between residential CO2 emissions and time use, focussing on China as a key case study. To provide a better understanding of the energy implications of the lifestyle differences between urban and rural China, Pui Ting Wong and Yuan Xu utilise time-use methodology as an alternative way to explore the links between individual lifestyle and residential electricity consumption. They begin by examining how Chinese citizens divide their time between daily activities, highlighting patterns around indicators including age, gender, education, and economic status. They go on to quantify CO2 intensities of these time-use activities. Through this linkage, this book presents an alternative strategy for climate-friendly living, highlighting the ways in which urban planning can be deployed to help individuals adapt their time-use patterns for CO2 mitigation. Providing a novel contribution to the growing literature on residential electricity consumption, Residential Electricity Consumption in Urbanizing China will be of great interest to scholars of climate policy, energy studies, time use, and urban planning.