The impact of urbanization on residential energy consumption in China: An aggregated and disaggregated analysis

Although the relationship among urbanization, energy consumption and CO2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years, little attention has been paid to the effect of urbanization on residential energy consumption. China as the largest developing country still has tremendous potential for urbanization in the future, and this paper thus explores the effect of urbanization on the changes of residential energy consumption during 1996–2012 for China both from aggregated and disaggregated perspectives, using the Divisia decomposition method. The findings on aggregated energy show that the urbanization contributes 15.4% to the increase of residential energy consumption during 1996–2012 but with a diminishing trend over time. Meanwhile, from the disaggregated perspective, the urbanization process contributes to an improvement of residential energy consumption structure. Specifically, 1% of increase in urbanization rate may result in a decrease of 420 thousand million tonnes of residential coal consumption and an increase of 301 thousand tonnes of oil consumption.