Preliminary results from a bottom-up analysis to determine residential energy consumption in the emerging economies of the world

Studies forecasting the future demand for energy in developing countries often employ a top-down approach whereby total residential energy consumption or total fuel consumption is compiled by government agencies or utilities and projections are made for future demand based on some assumption of overall growth in different sectors of the economy. Such studies, while useful in predicting the future demand for energy, do not help identify where the best opportunities for efficiency improvements lie. This report employs a bottom-up approach. To quantify the benefits of more efficient appliances, they have looked at specific end-use appliances, their saturation levels, unit energy consumption and sales in specific countries of interest. Such data are very difficult to obtain and they were able to gather sufficient data for the analysis for China only. Residential electricity consumption by end-use is calculated for refrigerators and air conditioners in China under 3 efficiency scenarios. There is much you cannot know from a top-down approach. For example, this analysis suggests that for air conditioners in china, standards can help control rate of growth in energy use of CO{sub 2} emissions but cannot bring emissions of CO{sub 2} back down to 1990 levels, or even 2000 levels. For refrigerators,more » very aggressive efficiency standards in China could maintaining carbon emissions approximately at the 2000 level even with further increases in household saturation. This is not possible for air conditioners because achievable efficiency improvements would not be great enough to overcome the estimated rise in the total number of air conditioners in use.« less