Conceptualizing urban household energy use: Climbing the “Energy Services Ladder”

By Benjamin Sovacool. 2011

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article begins by defining energy services and identifying how they differ according to sector, urban and rural areas, and direct and indirect uses. It then investigates household energy services divided into three classes: lower income, middle income, and upper income. It finds that the primary energy technologies involved with low-income households involve a greater number of fuels and carriers, ranging from dung and fuelwood to liquefied petroleum gas and charcoal, but a fewer number of services. Middle-income households throughout the world tend to rely on electricity and natural gas, followed by coal, liquefied petroleum gas, and kerosene. These homes utilize energy to produce a much broader range services. The upper class or rich have access to the same energy fuels, carriers, and technologies as middle-income homes and families, but consume more energy (and more high luxury items). The study highlights how focusing on energy services reorients the direction of energy policy interventions, that energy services are neither uniform nor innate, and by noting exciting areas of potential research.

Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b21b35f6fb141c4454802eb498559aa88fbae2b

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Citations in the corpus

A global perspective on domestic energy deprivation: Overcoming the energy poverty-fuel poverty binary (2015, background): “At this point, it should be emphasized that the literature on developing world energy poverty generally offers a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between energy services and household needs [see, for example, [107]].”
The Material Stock–Flow–Service Nexus: A New Approach for Tackling the Decoupling Conundrum (2017, background): “Two recent strands of research where service indicators have been intensively discussed are those concerned with energy services [115,116] and ecosystem services [117,118].”
The uniqueness of the energy security, justice, and governance problem☆ (2012, background): “The land-use implications are massive: about half of global useable land is now in pastoral or intensive agriculture (Brown and Sovacool, 2011).”
Long-Run Demand for Energy Services: Income and Price Elasticities over Two Hundred Years (2014, background): “These different preferences help to explain the “energy ladder” whereby, as consumers’ incomes rise, they shift from using biomass fuels to coal and then from coal to oil, gas, and electricity (Barnes and Floor 1986; Sovacool 2011).”