Moving towards an energy efficient future

Abstract

Finally and most importantly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my parents, who always believe in me and have endured my absence from family for so many years. Thank you so much for your love, support and giving me the freedom to chase my dreams. 11 SummaryAs an influential development paradigm, sustainable development has gained broad support from various governments and organizations at regional, national and global levels. It is a process involving many important dimensions and its study requires efforts from researchers from all the disciplines of natural and social sciences. In this thesis, we focus on energy efficiency, a key element in the pursuit of sustainable development. The dynamics of energy efficiency is an evolutionary process that involves industries, technologies and institutions. Therefore, it requires a wide range of policies, aimed at both macro and micro levels. It is of primary importance to have a careful economic study of all the detailed processes that are involved in the policy-relevant areas. Numerous programs, funds, facilities related to energy efficiency have been implemented so far and are still ongoing. In the study of energy efficiency, many policy-relevant areas that require numerous research and financial inputs and careful empirical analysis are involved. Due to data availability and the feasibility of this study to be effectively conducted, as an early step, we narrow down our research at micro and macro levels to the following aspects: energy consumption and energy efficiency at sectoral and country levels, aggregate vehicle energy efficiency (regional level) and the technologies related to energy efficiency in the fields of power station, ICT in buildings and vehicles. We hope that our results can shed light on the relevant policies and studies in the future.Using large datasets, this dissertation provides a comprehensive narrative of how energy efficiency and the technologies related to energy efficiency evolve over time. We develop a new analytical framework and several measures for crucial factors affecting energy consumption and energy efficiency in trade at sectoral and country levels. Based on big data of individual vehicles and their owners, we design an empirical statistical approach to estimate regional aggregate vehicle energy efficiency that is formed by the technological characteristics and collective behaviors of micro-agents (e.g., purchase and usage of vehicles and migration), and describe the life cycle and restructuring of the vehicle population. Also, we identify the technological trajectories of technologies related to energy efficiency, and develop some measures for whether a country can be classified as an incumbent country or a latecomer country, and for how much a country contributes to technological development. The approaches used in this dissertation that build aggregate or macro measures on the basis of detailed and micro large datasets are of great value for the study of economic, industrial and scientific evolution. The 12 optimal ...