Approaches To Energy Poverty Assessment And Their Application In China

Human society could hardly proceed without energy, yet a serious of problems caused byenergy poverty constrains the development, affect the social equity and aggravate the environmentalpressure. Energy poverty has considerable, even irreversible consequence on resident health. Chinahas presented itself by structural and regional differences in enrgy production and consumption. AndChina plays an important role in meeting the goal of Sustainable Energy for All. It is of greatsignificance to alleviate, even eradicate energy poverty for a sustainable development in the long run.Based on literature review of energy poverty, this paper focuses on the evaluation method forenergy poverty and its application in China. This paper explored the characteristics of China’s energypoverty, analyzed the factors which drive energy poverty alleviation, and evaluated the situation ofChina’s energy poverty. The main contents and innovative work are displayed as follows:(1) Energy availability is a main focus of energy poverty research, this paper evaluated energyavailability of China from the perspective of energy equity. This paper modified Energy Theil Indexto analyze the difference of residential electricity and commercial energy consumption between ruraland urban, and employed the Energy Gini coefficient to explore the inequality of residentialelectricity and gas in urban China.This paper found that: the difference of residential electricityconsumption among rural areas was still significant. Distribution of residential commercial energyconsumption was relatively equal in whole China, but the gap of urban areas was relativelysignificant. The distribution of gas consumption in urban areas was inequality, especially in urbanareas with lowest economic level, or samll population size.(2) Energy poverty research of developed countries focuse on energy affordability. The residentsof urban China may not be able to afford the bill of energy, as they mainly consumed commercialenergy, but related research in urban China is less. This paper built models to evaluate theaffordability of residential energy consumption in urban China. This paper found that: most urbanresidents were able to afford the energy bill. In order to meet the basic demand, in2012, residents ofHunan, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces have to expend more than10%of income. The residents ofsouthern provinces have more difficulty in affording energy bills, the gap between south and northwas significant.(3) Energy poverty status in various areas of China is different, so that this paper constructed anenergy poverty comprehensive evaluation index to assess regional energy poverty. This paper usedthe Analytic Hierarchy Process based optimal transfer matrix to weight the index, used the Linearand nonlinear models to synthesize index.This paper found that: overall energy poverty presentsitself in a downward trend, although the speed is slow. The distribution of regional energy poverty was not consistent with the distribution of regional economic development, and energy poverty alsoexists in economical well developed areas.(4) In order to evaluate the driving force on alleviating energy poverty, this paper chose theenergy cognition as subjective factor, and Socio-economic factors as objective factors. This paperused survey data and Structural Equation Modeling to evaluate the route from environment, health,efficiency, and energy-saving awareness to updating facilities and improving energy consumption.This paper explored the relationship between energy poverty and economic development, educationlevel, resources, price and temperature. This paper found that: health awareness significant impactthe behavior which could alleviate energy poverty and the influence of energy-saving awareness wasnot significant. The moderating effects of gender, age and education variables were not significant.Economic development advanced residential electricity consumption and improved residentialenergy structure. The income elasticities of residential electricity consumption have threshold effects.This paper focuses on the basic topics of China’s energy poverty, and the results of this papercould support the policies which aim at alleviating energy poverty of China in the future. This papercalls for more attention of academy and authorities on China’s energy poverty.