An Energy Analysis of Household Consumption: Changing Patterns of Direct and Indirect Use in India (Alliance for Global Sustainability Bookseries)

The book takes a socio-economic approach to analyzing the energy system and energy consumption in India from a household perspective. In doing so, it views households as the ultimate end-consumers and estimates and analyzes the direct and indirect energy requirements of household consumption, both at an aggregate national level as well as for individuals or groups of households. In addition, the work incorporates two crucial aspects often ignored by many traditional modelling approaches that are characteristic of most developing countries, namely the importance of non-commercial sources of energy, mostly biofuels, in the energy systems of these countries, and the very large diversity in the patterns of energy use across households with widely diverging lifestyles and levels of well being. Adopting a household perspective allows for analyzing how energy use patterns and consumption patterns are linked with the quality of life of individual households or persons and provides a novel view of the energy system and development in India. The work makes a first step in identifying key driving forces and some important trends in technical, economic, demographic, and lifestyles changes that are having an impact on the patterns and use of energy within the country, covering a time horizon of the last couple of decades.