Integrated Analysis of Household Energy Consumption Behavior Across the Residential and Transport Sectors

Given the rapid increase of energy demand in the world, especially in Asia, reducing energy use has been widely acknowledged as a means for both meeting future energy needs and addressing environmental problems (GHG emissions and climate change). This chapter aims to present an energy policy analysis that can answer the question of how to reduce household energy consumption from a behavioral perspective. Residential and transport energy consumption behavior in a household may be expected to be correlated, because of the existence of the rebound and self-selection effects. To examine this expectation, a mixed MDCEV and MNL-MDCEV models are first introduced into the energy field, from which the necessity for joint representation of residential and transport energy consumption is confirmed. Under this integrated framework, land-use policy is taken as an example and is designed to reduce energy use by explicitly controlling self-selection effects. This chapter on the one hand questions the traditional sector-oriented policy scheme by emphasizing the importance of cross-sector policy, while on the other hand it gauges the effect of land-use policies and shows the effectiveness of soft policy on household energy saving.