Research On Chinese Residential Energy Consumption Based On The Price Factor

Energies are the motives of modern society development. At present, energy consumption is facing many problems in our country, the situation of which is rather sever. Residential energy consumption is one of the most important components of China’s energy consumption. The quantity of Chinese residential energy consumption amounted to 264.94 million tons of standard coal equivalent(TCE) or 185.45 million tons of oil equivalent(TOE) in 2011. By contrast, the national energy consumption of England was 286.43 TCEs or 200.5 million TOEs, and the national energy consumption of Italy was 242.29 TCEs or 169.6 TOEs, which is lower than Chinese residential energy consumption in the same year.In order to study the realistic situations and characteristics of Chinese residential energy consumption, and provide references to the government when making policies about energy saving and emission reduction. According to the influence factors of REC this paper studied the Chinese residential energy consumption, which dealt with the following tasks:1) Firstly, the paper reviewed the historical trajectory of Chinese residential energy consumption and the price of eight types of energies, and compared the residential energy consumption structure and residential energy expenditure structure. When it comes to the effect of energy price on residential energy consumption, residential energy expenditure structure exerts more direct influence than residential energy consumption structure. After the analysis of the historical data, by decomposing the energy intensity index, the factor of energy prices was introduced into the decomposition analysis in this paper. And the LMDI method was adopted to decompose and analyze the Chinese residential energy consumption, the decomposition results of overall energy, structure energy consumption intensity effect, energy expenditure proportion effect, resident income effect, population structure effect and population effect was obtained. Furthermore, the paper analyzed the results and the corresponding social and economic roots.2) This paper analyzed the availability of Stirpat in the research of residential energy consumption. Based on the theoretical foundation of Stirpat, it made some promotion in terms of the characteristic of residential consumption by introducing price factor and resident living standard into this model.The features and influence factors are quite different between urban and rural residential energy consumption considering the duality of Chinese economy. Therefore, this paper constructed the residential energy consumption Stirpat for urban and rural residential energy consumption respectively by PLS regression and obtained the corresponding elasticity coefficient to explore how the residential energy consumption varies as the influence factors change.3) On the basis of Environmental Kuznets Curves theory, this paper analyzed the adaptability of Environmental Kuznets Curves of Chinese residential energy consumption during different periods. Besides, it made an EKC research on 12 relationships involving the average income, living standard(measured by Engel’s Coefficient),average energy consumption,average energy expenditure and energy expenditure proportion of urban and rural residents separately and compared the theoretical peak point to the real one.