IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/energy/v211y2020ics0360544220316522.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Influence of improved supply on household electricity consumption - Evidence from rural India

Author

Listed:
  • Agrawal, Shalu
  • Harish, S.P.
  • Mahajan, Aseem
  • Thomas, Daniel
  • Urpelainen, Johannes

Abstract

Even as India pursues universal electricity access, household electricity consumption remains poorly understood. Studies have investigated residential electricity consumption, but most focus on urban consumers, even though a majority of the newly electrified households are in rural areas. Using primary data from 10,000 households, we investigate rural electricity consumption in 200 villages in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, and Rajasthan. We rely on energy use surveys that capture appliance use and multiple energy sources. We find that the surveyed households typically consume 39.3 kWh per month during the summer months, which is half of the country’s average residential consumption. We also find that hours of grid-electricity supply predicts consumption: every 1% increase in supply hours is associated with a 1.245% increase in consumption. Our findings suggest that improved supply can lead to significant welfare gains for consumers, and allow distribution companies to tap into unmet electricity demand in rural areas.

Suggested Citation

  • Agrawal, Shalu & Harish, S.P. & Mahajan, Aseem & Thomas, Daniel & Urpelainen, Johannes, 2020. "Influence of improved supply on household electricity consumption - Evidence from rural India," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 211(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:211:y:2020:i:c:s0360544220316522
    DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2020.118544
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220316522
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.energy.2020.118544?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tso, Geoffrey K.F. & Yau, Kelvin K.W., 2007. "Predicting electricity energy consumption: A comparison of regression analysis, decision tree and neural networks," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 32(9), pages 1761-1768.
    2. Dominique van de Walle & Martin Ravallion & Vibhuti Mendiratta & Gayatri Koolwal, 2017. "Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 31(2), pages 385-411.
    3. Huebner, Gesche & Shipworth, David & Hamilton, Ian & Chalabi, Zaid & Oreszczyn, Tadj, 2016. "Understanding electricity consumption: A comparative contribution of building factors, socio-demographics, appliances, behaviours and attitudes," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 692-702.
    4. Khandker, Shahidur R. & Barnes, Douglas F. & Samad, Hussain A., 2012. "Are the energy poor also income poor? Evidence from India," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 1-12.
    5. Espey, James A. & Espey, Molly, 2004. "Turning on the Lights: A Meta-Analysis of Residential Electricity Demand Elasticities," Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 36(1), pages 65-81, April.
    6. Paul J. Gertler & Orie Shelef & Catherine D. Wolfram & Alan Fuchs, 2016. "The Demand for Energy-Using Assets among the World's Rising Middle Classes," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(6), pages 1366-1401, June.
    7. Shahidur R. Khandker & Douglas F. Barnes & Hussain A. Samad, 2013. "Welfare Impacts of Rural Electrification: A Panel Data Analysis from Vietnam," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 61(3), pages 659-692.
    8. Tiwari, Piyush, 2000. "Architectural, Demographic, and Economic Causes of Electricity Consumption in Bombay," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 81-98, January.
    9. Zhou, Shaojie & Teng, Fei, 2013. "Estimation of urban residential electricity demand in China using household survey data," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 394-402.
    10. Dugoua, Eugenie & Liu, Ruinan & Urpelainen, Johannes, 2017. "Geographic and socio-economic barriers to rural electrification: New evidence from Indian villages," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 278-287.
    11. Filippini, Massimo & Pachauri, Shonali, 2004. "Elasticities of electricity demand in urban Indian households," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 429-436, February.
    12. Jones, Rory V. & Fuertes, Alba & Lomas, Kevin J., 2015. "The socio-economic, dwelling and appliance related factors affecting electricity consumption in domestic buildings," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 901-917.
    13. Nina Boogen & Souvik Datta & Massimo Filippini, 2014. "Going beyond tradition: Estimating residential electricity demand using an appliance index and energy services," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 14/200, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    14. Getamesay Bekele & Workneh Negatu & Getachew Eshete, 2016. "Determinants of Household Energy Demand in Ethiopia: The Case Study of Addis Ababa City," Applied Economics and Finance, Redfame publishing, vol. 3(1), pages 1-14, February.
    15. Amemiya, Takeshi, 1984. "Tobit models: A survey," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 24(1-2), pages 3-61.
    16. Louw, Kate & Conradie, Beatrice & Howells, Mark & Dekenah, Marcus, 2008. "Determinants of electricity demand for newly electrified low-income African households," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(8), pages 2814-2820, August.
    17. Shahidur R. Khandker, Douglas F. Barnes, and Hussain A. Samad, 2012. "The Welfare Impacts of Rural Electrification in Bangladesh," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 1).
    18. Oda, Hisaya & Tsujita, Yuko, 2011. "The determinants of rural electrification: The case of Bihar, India," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(6), pages 3086-3095, June.
    19. Huang, Wen-Hsiu, 2015. "The determinants of household electricity consumption in Taiwan: Evidence from quantile regression," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 120-133.
    20. van Ruijven, Bas J. & van Vuuren, Detlef P. & de Vries, Bert J.M. & Isaac, Morna & van der Sluijs, Jeroen P. & Lucas, Paul L. & Balachandra, P., 2011. "Model projections for household energy use in India," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(12), pages 7747-7761.
    21. Kennedy, Ryan & Mahajan, Aseem & Urpelainen, Johannes, 2019. "Quality of service predicts willingness to pay for household electricity connections in rural India," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 319-326.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wassie, Yibeltal T. & Ahlgren, Erik O., 2023. "Determinants of electricity consumption from decentralized solar PV mini-grids in rural East Africa: An econometric analysis," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 274(C).
    2. Fanqi Zou & Tinghui Li, 2022. "The Impact of Agricultural Ecological Capital Investment on the Development of Green Circular Economy," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 12(4), pages 1-21, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jones, Rory V. & Fuertes, Alba & Lomas, Kevin J., 2015. "The socio-economic, dwelling and appliance related factors affecting electricity consumption in domestic buildings," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 901-917.
    2. Nsangou, Jean Calvin & Kenfack, Joseph & Nzotcha, Urbain & Ngohe Ekam, Paul Salomon & Voufo, Joseph & Tamo, Thomas T., 2022. "Explaining household electricity consumption using quantile regression, decision tree and artificial neural network," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 250(C).
    3. Ana Escoto Castillo & Landy Sánchez Peña, 2017. "Diffusion of Electricity Consumption Practices in Mexico," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-24, November.
    4. Gupta, Ridhima & Pelli, Martino, 2021. "Electrification and cooking fuel choice in rural India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    5. Riva, Fabio & Gardumi, Francesco & Tognollo, Annalisa & Colombo, Emanuela, 2019. "Soft-linking energy demand and optimisation models for local long-term electricity planning: An application to rural India," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 32-46.
    6. Satre-Meloy, Aven, 2019. "Investigating structural and occupant drivers of annual residential electricity consumption using regularization in regression models," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 148-168.
    7. Chakravorty, Ujjayant & Pelli, Martino & Ural Marchand, Beyza, 2014. "Does the quality of electricity matter? Evidence from rural India," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 107(PA), pages 228-247.
    8. Kennedy, Ryan & Mahajan, Aseem & Urpelainen, Johannes, 2019. "Quality of service predicts willingness to pay for household electricity connections in rural India," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 319-326.
    9. Tilov, Ivan & Farsi, Mehdi & Volland, Benjamin, 2020. "From frugal Jane to wasteful John: A quantile regression analysis of Swiss households’ electricity demand," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    10. Enrico Nano, 2022. "Electrifying Nigeria: the Impact of Rural Access to Electricity on Kids' Schooling," IHEID Working Papers 03-2022, Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies.
    11. Jean Gaston Tamba & Flavian Emmanuel Sapnken & Tchitchile Wilfried Emmanuel Azong & Serge Guefano & Armand Fopah Lele & Louis Monkam, 2022. "An Overview of Electricity in Cameroon: Current Status, Influential Factors and Government Actions," International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, Econjournals, vol. 12(4), pages 470-481, July.
    12. Chalal, Moulay Larbi & Benachir, Medjdoub & White, Michael & Shahtahmassebi, Golnaz & Cumberbatch, Miranda & Shrahily, Raid, 2017. "The impact of the UK household life-cycle transitions on the electricity and gas usage patterns," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 505-518.
    13. Besagni, Giorgio & Borgarello, Marco, 2018. "The determinants of residential energy expenditure in Italy," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 165(PA), pages 369-386.
    14. Debnath, Ramit & Bardhan, Ronita & Sunikka-Blank, Minna, 2019. "How does slum rehabilitation influence appliance ownership? A structural model of non-income drivers," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 418-428.
    15. Obsa Urgessa Ayana & Jima Degaga, 2022. "Effects of rural electrification on household welfare: a meta-regression analysis," International Review of Economics, Springer;Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS), vol. 69(2), pages 209-261, June.
    16. Fujii, Tomoki & Shonchoy, Abu S., 2020. "Fertility and rural electrification in Bangladesh," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    17. Bayer, Patrick & Kennedy, Ryan & Yang, Joonseok & Urpelainen, Johannes, 2020. "The need for impact evaluation in electricity access research," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    18. Santosh Kumar & Ganesh Rauniyar, 2018. "The impact of rural electrification on income and education: Evidence from Bhutan," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(3), pages 1146-1165, August.
    19. Javier Bueno & Desiderio Romero-Jordán & Pablo del Río, 2020. "Analysing the Drivers of Electricity Demand in Spain after the Economic Crisis," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(20), pages 1-18, October.
    20. Shigeru Matsumoto, 2015. "Electric Appliance Ownership and Usage: Application of Conditional Demand Analysis to Japanese Household Data," Proceedings of International Academic Conferences 3105452, International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:211:y:2020:i:c:s0360544220316522. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/energy .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.