China Residential Energy Consumption Survey
The Industry and Transportation Statistics Department of China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is responsible for collecting and compiling the country's energy statistics. NBS is making efforts to improve the quality of its energy statistics in a variety of areas, including residential energy use. Better information on residential energy use would greatly improve the accuracy of China's energy balances, and provide key information needed to policy makers for decisions pertaining to household energy and welfare.
The Chinese government in recent years has begun setting standards for energy efficiency of household appliances, with substantial technical assistance from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and other US organizations. In the US standards-setting process, detailed information from the US Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), compiled by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), is used to analyze the economic, energy, and environmental impacts of proposed standards. Equivalent information about household energy use in China is needed to support the expanding standards-setting process there.
A pilot China Residential Energy Consumption Survey (C-RECS I) was conducted in 1999, covering 251 households in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Yixing, and Shenyang (Brockett, et al., 2002). The survey was jointly planned and conducted by LBNL, the NBS's Information Consultation Center, the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Technical Economic and Energy System Analysis group at Tsinghua University. While this study was useful in demonstrating the feasibility of this type of survey and produced previously unavailable information, the sample size and data collected were limited, and only urban households were surveyed.
Preparations are under way to conduct a second China Residential Energy Consumption Survey II (C-RECS II). This project would aim to carry out a full-scale survey of household energy use in China. The content of the survey would be adapted and expanded from the C-RECS-I survey instrument, which was based on the US RECS survey. It would provide data that would be used to improve China's energy consumption statistics, to provide input to the standards-setting process for household appliances, to create reference-year data upon which future C-RECS surveys could be built, and other uses. For further information, please contact Jonathan Sinton.