The impact of the UK household life-cycle transitions on the electricity and gas usage patterns

The residential sector accounts for approximately 27% and 17% of the world energy consumption and its CO2 emission, respectively. Thus, it is necessary to develop measures to reduce the dioxide emissions in this sector to ensure the sustainable development of the urban environment. However, the majority of existing sustainable measures revolve around improving the thermal quality of the building's envelope with lesser focus on the social and behavioural aspects of energy consumption. For those reasons, our paper aims to address a completely new social aspect of energy sustainability which is household life-cycle transitions. More precisely, we will investigate the impact of UK households transitions from one household type to another (e.g. single to couple) on their energy consumption. To attain this, an official British database, which encompasses around 6000 households observed annually for over 10 years, was analysed using some statistical tests and procedures, including logistic regression. This enabled us to first determine the socioeconomic factors influencing the households’ evolutionary patterns. Subsequently, predict possible future transition patterns for a period of 10 years. Based on that, the impact of the predicted transitions on gas and electricity consumption was enquired. The analysis of main findings has suggested that households transition patterns have a significant impact on their gas and electricity consumption. However, this effect is weak and mostly positive in direction. Finally, we argue that incorporating the powerful concept of household life-cycle transition into urban energy planning will permit the forecasting of residential energy consumption in relation to different household transition patterns. This will in turn assist urban planners in their sustainable energy planning decision-making and enable them to develop appropriate measures.