Holidays in lights: Tracking cultural patterns in demand for energy services

Abstract

Successful climate change mitigation will involve not only technological innovation, but also innovation in how we understand the societal and individual behaviors that shape the demand for energy services. Traditionally, individual energy behaviors have been described as a function of utility optimization and behavioral economics, with price restructuring as the dominant policy lever. Previous research at the macro-level has identified economic activity, power generation and technology, and economic role as significant factors that shape energy use. However, most demand models lack basic contextual information on how dominant social phenomenon, the changing demographics of cities, and the sociocultural setting within which people operate, affect energy decisions and use patterns. Here we use high-quality Suomi-NPP VIIRS nighttime environmental products to: (1) observe aggregate human behavior through variations in energy service demand patterns during the Christmas and New Year's season and the Holy Month of Ramadan and (2) demonstrate that patterns in energy behaviors closely track sociocultural boundaries at the country, city, and district level. These findings indicate that energy decision making and demand is a sociocultural process as well as an economic process, often involving a combination of individual price-based incentives and societal-level factors. While nighttime satellite imagery has been used to map regional energy infrastructure distribution, tracking daily dynamic lighting demand at three major scales of urbanization is novel. This methodology can enrich research on the relative importance of drivers of energy demand and conservation behaviors at fine scales. Our initial results demonstrate the importance of seating energy demand frameworks in a social context.

An improved method for retrieving nighttime aerosol optical thickness from the VIIRS Day/Night Band

“…For example, I a , which is the surface artificial light source emission, is assumed to be invariant through the study period. However, I a may indeed, and almost certainly does, change with time and viewing geometry (e.g., Román and Stokes, 2015). Even with a constant satellite zenith angle, viewing direction could present an additional issue, especially when viewing artificial light sources.…”

The Lights of Iraq: Electricity Usage and the Iraqi War-Fare Regime

“…&:showVizHome=no#1 establishment of a new "fiscal contract" seems necessary also to address the "dictatorship dilemma", according to which dictators or religious Leviathans can foster their acceptance among the population and electoral representation through new forms of social cooptation (see Genschel et al 2016). Considering these circumstances, the available data strongly suggest that the ways in which "people illuminate the night" (Román and Stokes 2015) and their life will be strongly correlated to the positive introduction of a new fiscal contract and new steering-mechanisms.…”

On the impact of granularity of space-based urban CO2 emissions in urban atmospheric inversions: A case study for Indianapolis, IN

“…html), have known limitations (e.g., Elvidge et al, 2013). The authors are working on applying new nightlight environmental product developed from data collected by Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suites (VIIRS) on Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite (Román and Stokes, 2015) to the ODIAC emission model . There are a number of improvements in VIIRS over the previous instrument which will mitigate the mapping error originating from the use of current nightlight data.…”