SUMMARY
The use of fossil energy sources, one of the main causes of CO2 emissions, increased very fast the past decades. One way of reducing CO2 emissions is to reduce household energy requirements by influencing the consumption pattern. A household not only uses direct energy in the form of gas, electricity and petrol, but it also uses indirect energy embodied in consumer goods such as food, furniture and services. The aim of this study is to obtain an overview of the changes of the total energy requirement of Dutch households in the past decades.
To obtain an overview of the cumulative energy requirement of an average Dutch household, we combined energy intensities for 1990 with indexed expenditure data from the budget surveys and the National Accounts of the CBS with the annual expenditure of households from 1948 to 1992. In this study we have limited ourselves to take only into account the effect of changes in the consumption and no other changes affecting the energy requirement such as the influence from energy intensity changes of the production sectors.
From the year 1948 to 1988 the total primary energy requirement increased. The rise in energy consumption is mainly due to a rise in household consumption. Furthermore, the increasing share of direct energy consumption in the total energy requirement plays a role. For each consumption category the energy requirement grew from 1948 to 1988. The energy requirement for the consumption categories electricity, household effects, leisure & education and the house grew more than the total energy requirement. The use of petrol grew the quickest, on the average more than 8% per year for the past 40 years. The modifications in the total energy intensity, mainly caused by changes in the share of direct energy consumption, were small in the past four decades. The indirect energy intensity was quite constant.
It should be stressed that in our analysis only the effects of changes in consumption patterns have been taken into account, not the effect of modifications (e.g. efficiency improvements) in sectors that deliver goods and services to the households. If the effects of energy intensity changes of the producing sectors in the past decades are taken into account, the rise in energy consumption becomes somewhat smaller than stated above and has even declined from 1981 to 1984.
Taking this into account, we conclude that apart from the variation in the share in the direct energy carriers in past forty years of the direct energy carriers no major trends have been found in more or less energy intensive household consumption patterns.