Impact of household transitions on domestic energy consumption and its applicability to urban energy planning

Abstract

The household sector consumes roughly 30% of Earth's energy resources and emits approximately 17% of its carbon dioxide. As such, developing appropriate policies to reduce the CO 2 emissions, which are associated with the world's rapidly growing urban population, is a high priority. This, in turn, will enable the creation of cities that respect the natural environment and the well-being of future generations. However, most of the existing expertise focuses on enhancing the thermal quality of buildings through building physics while few studies address the social and behavioral aspects. In fact, focusing on these aspects should be more prominent, as they cause between 4% and 30% of variation in domestic energy consumption. Premised on that, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect in the context of the UK of household transitions on household energy consumption patterns. To achieve this, we applied statistical procedures (e.g., logistic regression) to official panel survey data comprising more than 5500 households in the UK tracked annually over the course of 18 years. This helped in predicting future transition patterns for different household types for the next 10 to 15 years. Furthermore, it enabled us to study the relationship between the predicted patterns and the household energy usage for both gas and electricity. The findings indicate that the life cycle transitions of a household significantly influence its domestic energy usage. However, this effect is mostly positive in direction and weak in magnitude. Finally, we present our developed urban energy model "EvoEnergy" to demonstrate the importance of incorporating such a concept in energy forecasting for effective sustainable energy decision-making.

Big Data to support sustainable urban energy planning: The EvoEnergy project

“…Other studies such as Abrahamse and Steg (2009), Poortinga et al (2004), and Bedir et al (2013) found the effect of age on residential energy usage not significant. Recently, we have found that household transition patterns from one family to another does have a significant effect on their energy consumption patterns (Medjdoub and Chalal, 2017). For example, on average, a single non-elderly household has a 53.3% chance of moving to different household types after 5 years, where the possibility of becoming a couple with children is 12.1%.…”

“…The effect of socio-economic, behavioral, physical, psychological factors on domestic energy consumption has been extensively reviewed in the literature (Druckman and Jackson, 2008;Abrahamse and Steg, 2009;Frederiks et al, 2015;Longhi, 2015). In our previous study (Medjdoub and Chalal, 2017), we contributed to this body of literature by investigating the impact of household demographic transitions on their energy consumption patterns. Our findings suggested that household transition patterns from one family type to another have a significant effect on their domestic energy usage.…”

“…By knowing the future transitions probabilities of consumers to different family structures over their lifecycle, marketers could anticipate their needs and determine the services and products that are suitable for them and in a proactive manner (Du and Kamakura, 2006;Hitesh, 2018). In response to the lack of energy prediction tools supporting household lifecycle transition patterns, we have previously developed a 3D urban energy prediction system (Evo-Energy) (Medjdoub and Chalal, 2017). EvoEnergy has the ability to predict domestic energy at the urban scale in function of (1) household transitions from one family type to another (e.g., from single to couple without children, etc.…”

“…This could be partially attributed to the fact that algorithms of such tools, which have been developed using specific data sets (e.g., the British household panel data survey (BHPS)), may not reflect current demographic and socioeconomic changes of an evolving population. To this end, the research presented in this paper builds upon our previous work (Medjdoub and Chalal, 2017) on the effect of household transition patterns on domestic energy consumption by evaluating the performance of EvoEnergy under the new UK household longitudinal study (UKHLS). To achieve this aim, the following objectives have been addressed:…”

“…First, Section 2 gives an overview of studies that have analyzed the impact of various factors on residential energy consumption. This section ends with a brief insight into EvoEnergy published previously by Medjdoub and Chalal (2017) to help the reader acquaint with the topic. Section 3 discusses the research methodology.…”