Full length articleUncovering urban residents’ electricity conservation and carbon reduction potentials in megacities of China–A systematic path of behavioural interventions
Introduction
Climate change has been recognised widely as the current major global environmental issue. With a massive economy and high growth rates (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2016), China has become the world's main carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter, producing 31% of global CO2 emissions in 2020 (IEA, 2021). To fulfil its ambitions of curbing carbon emissions, China has pledged to achieve peak carbon emissions around by 2030, reducing carbon intensity by nearly 65% compared to 2005 levels, and eventually achieve the carbon neutrality objective by 2060 (General Office of the State Council, 2020). According to the IEA (2019), the power sector accounted for almost two-thirds of the increase in global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2018. Moreover, during 2000-2017, residential electricity use increased at an annual rate of 11.37%, an increase of approximately 6.25 times (907.2 billion kWh in 2017), which indicates that electricity requirements will continue to rise as China achieves higher GDP growth.
Both the amount and the ratio of residential electricity consumption per capita will continue to grow as income growth and urbanisation accelerates. In 2017, residential electricity consumption per capita in China was only 654.3 kWh (National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), 2019), whereas it was 4271 kWh in the US. Moreover, residential consumption in China made up 14% of the total electricity demand, whereas residential consumption accounted for 27% of the global gross electricity consumption, with the share in most countries being 16%-50% (Torriti, 2014; U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2019). Therefore, the residential sector is an important contributor to the total carbon emissions in China, and residential electricity demand continues to grow faster than does demand for other kinds of energy (Zhou and Teng, 2013; Zhang and Peng, 2017).
Currently, China has implemented the tiered pricing for housing electricity (TPHE) in 2012 to guide rational electricity use. However, the residential electricity price in average of China remain relatively low level comparing with developed countries, which is 0.08 USD/kWh in China while 0.13 and 0.23 USD/kWh in US and Japan respectively in 2018 (Lin and Zhu, 2021; Wang and Lin, 2021). Wang et al. (2021) verified the majority of residents are insensitive to the current electricity price, resulting in excessive electricity consumption in China. Along with the rising living quality of China, residential electricity price can be an effective tool in adjusting citizen electricity consumption.
These trends suggest that control of residential electricity consumption will be of major importance in residential energy conservation and development of a carbon neutral society. This paper aims to uncover the residents’ electricity conservation behaviours and initiative to save electricity consumption under different context of policy anticipation. Adopting electricity price intervention experiments, this study explores household electricity saving and carbon reduction potential of four megacities in China. By doing so, we intend to provide valuable answers to the important questions above that will facilitate energy pricing reform and residential energy conservation efforts in China.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: a literature review is presented in Section 2, the research methodology is illustrated in Section 3, questionnaire surveys and empirical results are described in Section 4 and 5, and the conclusions and policy implication are discussed in Section 6.
Section snippets
Literature review
There have been many studies of residents’ electricity consumption and energy-saving behaviours. Motivating individuals to save energy and adopt the appropriate behaviour may contribute greatly to reducing energy consumption (Gao et al., 2017). The existing literature generally recognises the considerable significance of residential energy-saving behaviour in the reduction of total energy consumption and improvement of the atmospheric environment (Wang et al., 2012; Guo et al., 2018).
Conceptual framework development
This study established electricity price intervention experiments to improve the traditional electricity elasticity estimation method, while investigating the carbon reduction potential of residential electricity conservation behaviours (as shown in Fig. 1).
Firstly, we estimate the determinates of residential electricity consumption and conservation behaviour by constructing an electricity demand model adopting the multivariate regression model. We discuss the implications of major determinants
Description of questionnaires
The design of the questionnaires was based on a pre-survey in Beijing city and with reference to relative studies (Faruqui et al., 2010; Kavousian et al., 2013; Ding et al., 2017). Survey questions were divided into three categories: the electricity consumption behaviours, residents’ response to electricity price interventions, and consumer attributes. The face-to-face questionnaire began by asking respondents about their environmental awareness, and they were given four price-adjustment
Heterogeneous determinants of residential electricity consumption
Multiple regression models were used to demonstrate major determinants of residents’ electricity conservation (represented by the rate of change in electricity consumption obtained from questionnaire data) under four price intervention experiments.
As shown in Table 3, the estimation results also prove that family income and geographic features significantly influence residents’ electricity conservation. Furthermore, negative impacts of family income on electricity conservation strengthen with
Conclusions and policy implications
Using nationwide electricity price intervention experiments survey data of urban households in four megacities in China (covering different geographic features, income levels, and living habits), we focused on residential electricity consumption characteristics, illuminating how electricity price adjustment improves residential electricity conservation. The main results are as follows: Among various determinants impacting residential electricity consumption, economic measures (including
Credit author statement
Feng Xu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis. Chang Shu: Data curation, Investigation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Jing Shao: Investigation, Methodology. Nan Xiang: Conceptualization, Visualization, Investigation, Writing- Reviewing and Editing, Supervision.
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgments
We would like to specially thank reviewers for their helpful comments in this paper. This research was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality [Grant Number. 9214021], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Number. 41701635].
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