A measurement strategy to address disparities across household energy burdens

Energy inequity is an issue of increasing urgency. Few policy-relevant datasets evaluate the energy burden of typical American households. Here, we develop a framework using Net Energy Analysis and household socioeconomic data to measure systematic energy inequity among critical groups that need policy attention. We find substantial instances of energy poverty in the United States – 16% of households experience energy poverty as presently defined as spending more than 6% of household income on energy expenditures. More than 5.2 million households above the Federal Poverty Line face energy poverty, disproportionately burdening Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. For solar, wind, and energy efficiency to address socioeconomic mobility, programs must reduce energy expenditures by expanding eligibility requirements for support and access to improved conservation measures, efficiency upgrades, and distributed renewables. We recommend the United States develop a more inclusive federal energy poverty categorization that increases assistance for household energy costs.

3R Principle in Household Energy Consumption Patterns

Energy is an important issue for achieving sustainable development. Sustainable Development Goals emphasize renewable energy sources, green energy technologies, and energy efficiency for sustainable world. In addition, energy consumption patterns can influence energy efficiency as much as green energy policies. In this point, sustainable consumption patterns should be adapted into energy consumption. 3R principle can be an alternative model for sustainable energy consumption. This study aims to explore how household can adapt 3R principle in energy consumption patterns in Turkey. Turkey aims to achieve sustainable development goals and especially works to achieve energy security and efficiency in the long term. In this point, the contribution of households will play a critical role for energy efficiency and security in a country. The study analyzed open access data from TURKSTAT (Turkish Statistical Institute) to determine the framework of household energy consumption patterns.

Reduced health burden and economic benefits of cleaner fuel usage from household energy consumption across rural and urban China

Energy consumption in the residential sector is increasing rapidly in China. This study applies an integrated assessment model to investigate the adverse impacts of household energy consumption by various fuel types across rural and urban areas on age- and sex- specific premature deaths associated with PM2.5 pollution at provincial levels for 2015. We further estimate the economic and health co-benefits of a switch from solid fuels to electricity within households. We find that energy consumed by Chinese urban households was nearly 1.8 times than that of rural households. However, premature deaths due to household energy usage was 1.1 times higher in rural areas compared to urban areas due to direct use of coal for heating in rural households. The majority of household consumption-related premature deaths are predominately in the Southern area of China due to the population size and aging population. By replacing coal and biomass with electricity, this paper estimates economic benefits equal to 0.09% (95% CI: 0.08%-0.1%) GDP for rural areas and 0.006% (0.005%-0.007%) of GDP for urban areas of China. The results suggest that mitigation measures such as the promotion and subsidization of cleaner fuels, modern stove within rural households would yield these potential significant economic benefits.

Multi-Household Energy Management in a Smart Neighborhood in the Presence of Uncertainties and Electric Vehicles

The pathway toward the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is dependent upon increasing Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), demand response, and electrification of public and private transportation. Energy management techniques are necessary to coordinate the operation in this complex scenario, and in recent years several works have appeared in the literature on this topic. This paper presents a study on multi-household energy management for Smart Neighborhoods integrating RESs and electric vehicles participating in Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) and Vehicle-to-Neighborhood (V2N) programs. The Smart Neighborhood comprises multiple households, a parking lot with public charging stations, and an aggregator that coordinates energy transactions using a Multi-Household Energy Manager (MH-EM). The MH-EM jointly maximizes the profits of the aggregator and the households by using the augmented ϵ-constraint approach. The generated Pareto optimal solutions allow for different decision policies to balance the aggregator’s and households’ profits, prioritizing one of them or the RES energy usage within the Smart Neighborhood. The experiments have been conducted over an entire year considering uncertainties related to the energy price, electric vehicles usage, energy production of RESs, and energy demand of the households. The results show that the MH-EM optimizes the Smart Neighborhood operation and that the solution that maximizes the RES energy usage provides the greatest benefits also in terms of peak-shaving and valley-filling capability of the energy demand.

Role analysis of women in electricity consumption at domestic level

Women play an especial prominent role in buying things that provide sustenance for home and family. Therefore, this study was under taken to see how women play their role with special reference to electricity consumption and what can be done to improve it. ‘Awareness,’ ‘opinion’ and ‘practice’ of respondents regarding issues related to electricity consumption for household use revealed that ‘Awareness’, ‘Opinion’ and ‘Practices’ of the respondents were of ‘medium’ level. Looking at the women’s prominent role in household energy consumption they can be given some awareness programs to further play active role as consumer and conserve electricity.