Latest Publication: Energy Equity Gap

Energy limiting behavior is defined as the case when households are not able to meet their basic energy needs at home due to financial stress. Studying this behavior addresses a fundamental limitation of the expenditure-based measure of energy burden. The most popular measure (also the simplest) has been using the ratio of energy expenditure over income. If this ratio is high (e.g., >= .06), then a household is categorized as having a high level of energy burden. However, what about the case when households underconsume due to financial stress in the first place? These households would be missed by the expenditure-income measure, because if I’m not consuming a lot, the ratio will be relatively low (when keeping income constant).

The way we capture this dimension of underconsuming is to look at the temperature at which households turn on and off their cooling and heating units. The key assumption is that the energy-limiting households start using cooling (or heating) units later into a cooling (or heating) season, and such households also turn off cooling (or heating) units earlier, compared against non-energy-limiting households. An earlier paper conducted the analysis of cooling behavior in Arizona, USA.. Lower-income households were found to turn on and off their cooling units at a higher temperature than higher-income households, defined as energy equity gap.

We then conducted the analysis of both cooling and heating behaviors under a cold climate. This is recently published in Energy Policy titled Inequalities across cooling and heating in households: Energy equity gaps. We found energy equity gap again in northern Illinois, USA, although the pattern differs between the cooling case and the heating case. Here are the highlights:

• For cooling, low-income households consume less electricity for a shorter period than high-income households.

• For heating, low-income households consume less electricity for a longer period than high-income households.

• Households in black-majority block groups have a cooling gap that is 17% wider than households in white-majority block groups.

• Traditional income-based measure of energy poverty fails to identify some vulnerable households who underconsume.

Many thanks to my collaborators Destenie Nock, Shuchen Cong, and Yueming (Lucy) Qiu. Full text is available here. This work is part of my Postdoctoral Fellowship in Data Curation for Energy Social Sciences. This fellowship is made possible in partnership with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), with the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Abstract:
Understanding the degree of energy limiting behavior in low-income and vulnerable households is vital to eradicating energy poverty and associated negative health effects. We estimate the outdoor temperatures at which households turn on and off their electricity-based cooling and heating units under a cold climate in northern Illinois, USA (N = 418,255 for cooling; N = 22,628 for electric heating). We find that the cooling energy equity gap between low and high income groups is 3 °F (1.7 °C), while the electric-based heating energy equity gap is 6 °F (3.3 °C). The pattern of energy limiting behavior is found to be different between the cooling season and the heating season. Our metrics contribute to the policy design of home energy bill and weatherization assistance programs to identify vulnerable households in a cold climate: Among low-to-middle-income households, our metric identifies 19,001 households (20%) in the cooling sector and 1,290 households (24%) in the heating sector who may be neglected by the traditional income-based energy poverty measure. We also find that households living in black-majority census block groups have a cooling gap that is 17% wider than households living in white-majority census block groups. Policy design should focus on addressing the income inequality and other systematic inequalities that have impacted Black American households.