Heating and lighting: understanding overlooked energy-consumption activities in the Indian residential sector

Abstract

Understanding the climate impact of residential emissions starts with determining the fuel consumption of various household activities. While cooking emissions have been widely studied, non-cooking energy-consumption activities in the residential sector such as heating and lighting, have been overlooked owing to the unavailability of data at national levels. The present study uses data from the Carbonaceous Aerosol Emissions, Source Apportionment and Climate Impacts (COALESCE) project, which consists of residential surveys over 6000 households across 49 districts of India, to understand the energy consumed by non-cooking residential activities. Regression models are developed to estimate information in non-surveyed districts using demographic, housing, and meteorological data as predictors. Energy demand is further quantified and distributed nationally at a 4×4 km resolution. Results show that the annual energy consumption from non-cooking activities is 1106 [201] PJ, which is equal to one-fourth of the cooking energy demand. Freely available biomass is widely used to heat water on traditional stoves, even in the warmer regions of western and southern India across all seasons. Space heating (51%) and water heating (42%) dominate non-cooking energy consumption. In comparison, nighttime heating for security personnel (5%), partly-residential personal heating by guards, dominant in urban centers and kerosene lighting (2%) utilize minimal energy. Biomass fuels account for over 90% of the non-cooking consumption, while charcoal and kerosene make up the rest. Half of the energy consumption occurs during winter months (DJF), while 10% of the consumption occurs during monsoon, when kerosene lighting is the highest. Firewood is the most heavily used fuel source in western India, charcoal in the northern hilly regions, agricultural residues and dung cake in the Indo-Gangetic plains, and kerosene in eastern India. The study shows that ~20% of residential energy consumption is on account of biomass-based heating and kerosene lighting activities.

Drivers of PM2.5 Episodes and Exceedance in India: A Synthesis From the COALESCE Network

“…Analysis of air pollution extremes on finer time scales, would require daily scale emissions. Emission uncertainties addressed in previous (Kapoor et al, 2023;Navinya et al, 2023;Tibrewal et al, 2023) and ongoing work will not alter broad conclusions on dominant emission source influence, on the spatial and temporal scales of analysis used here.…”

“…In this work, we use a new emissions inventory, generated as part of the COALESCE network, the Speciated Multi‐Pollutant Generator (SMoG‐India COALESCE ) for anthropogenic emissions over India, for the base year 2019 (Figure 1). The emissions inventory is underpinned by new sectoral methodologies for prominent sectors, based on a large data set of new primary surveys and secondary geospatial data, to capture recent transitions in residential energy (Navinya et al., 2023), agriculture (Kapoor et al., 2023), on‐road transport and brick manufacture (Tibrewal et al., 2023) sectors. Other energy sectors including industry, electricity generation, formal and informal industry, others—solvents, minerals and mobile diesel generators are updated for 2019 activity data and literature emission factors, unit‐level disaggregation for electricity and heavy industry, and with improved industrial process representation to generate emissions on a 5 × 5 km spatial resolution over India.…”