Residential Responses to Service-Specific Electricity Demand : Case of China

Understanding the diversity of the residential demand for various electrical services is critical for utilities and policymakers in effective demand side management. However, previous research has usually treated the household as a unit of analysis, and thus may ignore the fact that household electricity consumption is derived demand driven by specific services and fail to examine the heterogeneous behavioral responses. Here we present a new pattern of residential demand for various electrical services and quantify the impacts of socioeconomic determinants in China. The conditional demand analysis is performed on the unique dataset of the Chinese Residential Energy Consumption Survey 2014 to estimate the electricity demand distribution for eight types of services and to investigate the effect of socioeconomic variables on behavioral responses to service-specific electricity consumption. The results show that, together, entertainment and food refrigeration account for about half of the total annual electricity consumption, followed by laundry, lighting, space cooling, and hot water. Rural households use about 7.2% of total electricity for cooking purposes, while urban counterparts hardly use electricity to cook. Electricity consumption is negligible for space heating for both urban and rural households. The heterogeneity in socioeconomic determinants is found not only among different electrical services but also between urban and rural households