Conclusion

Domestic sector is the major consumer of energy and contribute large extent to the total energy use in a city. Understanding the spatial pattern of domestic energy consumption is necessary for an appropriate policy measures towards low carbon city. The current analysis includes understanding of neighborhood and community of household, energy consumption pattern and corresponding carbon dioxide emission due to different inside household activities. Present study provides understanding of the trends in CO₂ emission in the urban household sector of different wards of Greater Bangalore. This study illustrates that different segments of population have very different energy consumption depending their socio-economic characteristics. The survey reveals a typical household family size, family income and the extent of adoption of renewable energy devices (Solar water heaters, etc.) play an important role in the energy consumption at households.

Energy used for cooking purposes in domestic sector includes electricity, fuel wood, LPG, etc. LPG is being used for cooking in the majority (78.75%, 1549) households. The spatial analysis of annual per capita electricity consumption reveals that about 700 samples use annual per capita electricity in the range 100-400 kWh and about 226 households use annual per capita electricity in the range 400-600 kWh. Zone wise analysis of annual electricity consumption shows the variation from 917.21- 754.05 (N E) to 1764.03-1362.29 (S). Similar trends are observed in per capita annual electricity consumption, which varies 230.91-210.84 (NE) to 412.30 -297.75 (S). Ward-wise total electricity (domestic and other sectors) consumption synthesis reveals that about 40 wards have annual per capita electricity consumption of 500 kWh, 23 wards have consumption of 500-1000 kWh. Majority of wards (84) are in the range of 1000-2000 kWh/person/year, 31 wards have the consumption of 2000-4000 kWh/person/year. A very high consumption of more than 4000 kWh/person/year is in 24 wards of South East Bangalore, mainly due to IT and BT industries and large scale high raise apartments.LPG is a dominant fuel used in the domestic sectors. Majority of households (1499, 76.2%) consumes one cylinder (of 14kg LPG) per month while 219 samples require 2 cylinders.LPG consumption varies from 181.46-57.94 (W) to 208.75- 97.50 (SE). Per capita annual LPG consumption varies 42.33-20.02 (E) to 54.02-34.76 (SE). Pertaining to the link between energy consumption with the social factors, negative correlation between household size and energy consumption per capita is observed in the sample analysis. A proportional increase of the per capita energy consumption with income (r= 0.983), suggests that economic level of a household is an important factor in domestic energy consumption. The spatial distribution of annual per capita energy consumption shows that 767 households consume < 2 GJ/year while 888 households consuming 2-4 GJ/year. The energy consumption ranges from 0.129 GJ/year to 12.39 GJ/year with the average of 2.9-1.4 GJ/year and this is comparable to earlier reports. Emission from most of the wards (66 wards) is 10 to 15 Gg/year, while wards in peri-urban areas emit less than 10 Gg/year. Wards located at city center emit more than 25 Gg/year with maximum of 46.56 Gg/Year (Sarvagna Nagar) and minimum of 3.66 Gg/Year (Konena Agrahara ward). Extrapolation of these, show that total carbon dioxide from all wards of Greater Bangalore accounts to 3350 Gg/Year. The study illustrate that domestic sector contributes significantly to GHG emissions in the city. The findings emphasise the need to improve the end use energy efficiency to conserve household energy to mitigate emissions and focus on renewable sources of energy while formulating the sustainable energy policies.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) for its financial support (ARCP2011-07CMY-Han) to this research and thank BESCOM for providing zone-wise electricity data.