Rural household energy consumption with the economic development in China:stages and characteristic indices

This paper discusses history variance and general features on rural househo ld energy consumption with the economic development in China. Energy shorta ge has been a long-standing problem in rural areas of China. The average ef fective energy consumption was 0.46-0.54 kgce per day per household in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason for this is that the rural household energy sup ply mainly relies on the available amounts of local natural energy resource s. The problem of cooking fuel shortage was basically solved in the early 1 980s since more straw and stalks were produced due to the rapid development of agriculture. The process of energy commercialization also started from the early 1980s due to the availability of coal, fuel oil and other energy sources in the market, and the reconstruction of rural power supply network . Energy consumption was 369.8kgce per capita with 30% of commercial energy consumption and the effective heat per capita per day was 0.64kgce in 1995 . A closer relationship was found between household energy consumption leve l/structure and family income along with the economic development. This pap er analyzed the rural household energy consumption of three typical regions , i.e., out-of-poverty, well-off and rich regions, in terms of effective he at per capita per day, percentage of commercial energy consumption in total effective heat, electricity consumption per capita and room temperature of northern areas in winter. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserv ed.