The Spatial Dimension of Household Energy Consumption

Abstract

The vast majority of previous studies on household energy consumption (HEC) has presumed that the influencing factors of HEC are similar in each and every location regardless of the location specific circumstances. In other words, they assume that some generalizable facts explain the level of HEC and energy poverty across all areas of a city, country, region, and/or continent. At the national scale, the Third National Energy Efficiency Action Plan for the Netherlands, regarding the reduction of household energy consumption has introduced a variety of policy measures and incentives for reduction of HEC among them energy tax, reduction on VAT rate on labour cost of renovation of dwellings, energy saving agreement for rental sector, etc. Furthermore, the policy document emphasise that the geographic scope of all policy measures is “the Netherlands”. In this respect, Third National Energy Efficiency Action Plan for the Netherlands, introduce an identical set of measures and instrument for all areas of the Netherlands regardless of their location-specific circumstances. The objective of this thesis is to examine the validity of this presumption through five different studies four of which published as a scientific journal, and one of which is accepted for publication. To do so, the impact of a variety of the determinants of HEC of the Dutch neighbourhoods are studied and compared. The result of the studies shows that the impact of such determinants is spatially homogenous (i.e. similar across all neighbourhoods in question) or spatially heterogeneous (varies from one neighbourhood to another).