Recent Energy Consumption Trends in American Homes

Abstract

Given the growing environmental awareness, this paper intends to provide an updated picture on the relationships between 1) demographic factors and number of residential sustainable features (mainly appliances), 2) demographic factors and energy consumption (for all fuels), and 3) house size and energy consumption in American households. Using data from the 2015 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), this study applies descriptive and inferential statistics (poisson regression, spearman correlation and analysis of variance) to evaluate those relationships. The results indicate that income influences the number of sustainable appliances in a home, while education does not; on the other hand, the findings also indicate that education has a significant relationship to energy consumption (measured in thousand BTUs) per area of home, while income does not. Additionally, a significant moderate correlation between size of home and energy consumption was confirmed. This information is important given the steady but constant rise in home sizes in the U.S. since 1970s. Outcomes of this study can help understand the impact of demographic factors have on sustainable housing choices and on energy consumption while using a recent data set with large sample size.

A Comparison of Energy Consumption in American Homes by Climate Region

“…Finally, education and water heaters were not found to be significant factors in the analysis for any of the regions. This is interesting and contradicts recent findings related to the influence of education in a home's energy consumption by Debs et al [24] on the same dataset (though analysis was not controlled by climate zone) as well as Salari and Javid [22], who used a combination of United States EIA data for energy consumption and American Community Survey (ACS) for demographic data and have analyzed the results at the state level. Our findings seem to be more aligned with an indirect effect of household socio-economic characteristics on total energy consumption, as proposed by Karatasour and Santamouris [8].…”

“…Higher income may be associated with having more technology and electronics usage, but it does not contribute to a considerable or statistically significant increase in energy consumption [9,24,25]. In fact, previous research associated higher income with being able to afford more energy-efficient equipment [26].…”

“…Salari and Javid [23] found that a head of household with a higher education degree is effectively associated with lower energy usage. In a recent study, Debs et al [24] indicated that energy consumption was significantly influenced by the respondents' highest educational degree, though the same was not found significant when assessing its influence on the total number of energy star appliances in a home.…”