Spatially disaggregated energy demand forecasting for Indian households and policy formulation

Abstract

India contributes close to 5.7% of the world’s Green House Gas (GHG) emissions with total emissions of 2.432TtCO2e. The emissions are expected to increase further in the next few decades with the increasing population and economic growth. Given India’s commitments (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDC) to reduce the overall GHG emissions by 33% to 35% by 2030 (from 2005 levels) under the Paris Climate agreement, it is important to generate comprehensive estimates of the quantities and sources of GHG emissions. One approach to get an estimate of GHG emissions is to understand electricity consumption across industries in India and then transform this data into GHG emission estimates based on the average emissions emitted in electricity production in India. A similar study by Zhu Liu et al. (2012) on China’s greenhouse gas emission from regional and sectoral perspectives explored patterns and their driving forces by using upgraded energy consumption data. But, a similar analysis for electricity consumption has not been performed for India yet. This study thus aims to estimate the embodied electricity across industries and states in India. In the future, this can be utilized to get GHG emissions estimate across industries and state and will help design costeffective policies that meet the international commitments.