International Comparison of Household Energy Consumption and Its Indicator

Abstract

The structure of household energy consumption around the world varies greatly, according to the climate, living standards and lifestyles. It is important to understand the structure of energy consumption and lifestyle circumstances for each country, including developing country, for which energy use is expected to increase, from the past to the present day, in order to investigate the following questions. How much further will the world’s household energy use increase? How much energy will be needed to deliver sufficient energy services? Also, where is there room for energy efficiency? We surveyed residential energy consumption and its indicators in 18 countries, both developed and developing countries such as USA, Canada, Australia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, South Korea, China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan. We surveyed household energy use and the structural factors that influence it, including housing and household types, lifestyles, and types of equipment use. For the various survey categories and survey years, each country’s data is scattered, but we attempted, to the extent possible, to assemble continuous time series data. For developing countries of Asia there are big differences within the countries, so we assemble separate data for rural and urban areas. In the western countries, household energy consumption shows a trend toward saturation, but in the Asian countries it is likely that household energy consumption will continue to rise. In the developing countries of Asia, we do expect future changes in the structure of energy consumption to occur. The process by which such changes happen can be broken down into four parts. These are shown in Figure 8, for the Asian countries we studied here.