Exploring commercial sector building energy consumption in China

With the development of economy, commercial sector building energy consumption becomes more and more noticeable in China. The aim of this paper was to study the influencing factors governing commercial sector building energy consumption and the decoupling relation between building energy consumption and commercial sector economic development. The main results of this paper are as follows: (1) Commercial sector energy intensity decreased from 61.78 gce/yuan in 1991 to 36.70 gce/yuan in 2011, representing a decrease of 40.59 %. Since 2003, electricity has exceeded coal products and become the dominating energy. (2) The economic activity effect makes a positive contributor to the increase in commercial sector building energy consumption; however, the energy intensity effect plays an important role in decreasing energy consumption, followed by the energy structure effect. Same results have also been observed according to the relational degree. (3) Only four kinds of decoupling index occurred over 1991–2011. Strong decoupling occurred only in the years 1994, 1997, and 2008. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015