Residential and transport energy modelled at the personal level
Energy consumption in the domestic sector is responsible for around one-third to one-half of carbon emissions in most EU countries. The aim of the MODERATED POLICY (Modelling residential and transport energy for downstream policies) project was to understand the impact and distributional burden of downstream policies, which address the end users directly to combat carbon emissions. The initiative focused on carbon trading at the personal or household level to mitigate carbon emissions from the domestic sector such as personal transport and in the home. This was achieved through the development of an econometric demand model for joint consumption of in-house and transportation energy and through a questionnaire survey on responses to personal carbon trading. Researchers addressed the lack of understanding of the potential trade-off between household’s in-house energy use for cooking, heating, lighting and energy for personal transportation, mainly through car use. MODERATED POLICY filled this gap in the context of carbon trading at the household level, which has not been studied before. Intermediate to long term trade-offs in energy saving and carbon saving behaviour was studied and incorporated into the model. As there is no ‘real world’ example of carbon capped behaviour, MODERATED POLICY sought to understand potential responses through similar real-world examples. These included vehicle lease for a given cap in kilometres per month. The study’s main finding showed that average energy use and carbon emissions from transport use are more flexible and amenable than in-house energy use under a downstream trading policy. Researchers analysed the distribution of the emissions burden to create the foundations for a carbon tax and a personal trading policy. MODERATED POLICY results will contribute to the current policy debate on the potential of downstream policies to help reduce carbon emissions from the households and thus reduce overall carbon emissions
