Residential energy behavior

Abstract

While customized residential demand-side management (DSM) strategies are gaining attention as a means to achieve both economic development and environmental sustainability, there are major opportunities for their cost-effective and socially equitable implementation. One potential direction for such improvements is to explicitly account for the heterogeneity of household energy behavior in DSM planning from an integrated perspective. Understanding of the interaction between economic incentives and the households’ energy savings resources is necessary to offer practical guidelines for designing efficient residential energy service programs. Drawing on both the rational actor model and the lifestyle theory, this research investigates household space cooling behavior. I employ the random utility theory with Bayesian estimation procedure to develop a random coefficient multinomial logit choice mode based on household-level micro-data from the 2009 Residential Appliance Saturation Study (RASS) of the California Energy Commission. With the model, individual households’ energy behavior regarding different service comfort and cost levels given by discrete space-cooling choices are fully characterized. To provide concrete policy implications, the heterogeneous households are clustered according to their lifestyle embedded in the network of their socio-demographic and techno-economic properties. The results reveal that there is significant heterogeneity in the trade offs between space cooling comfort and attendant costs among Californian households. It is also found that the heterogeneity is well represented by five proxy variables for residential lifestyle, that is, household composition, housing structure, residence time, house type, and house vintage. Making sense of space cooling behavior from an integrated perspective, like the one employed in this study, would help develop tailored energy service program portfolios with an improved benefit-cost ratio. The choice model will later be extended to represent air conditioner purchase and maintenance decisions, offering a balanced, multi-level understanding of household energy behaviors. For the last decade, carbon nanotubes have been emerging as one of ideal materials for the building block of the forthcoming nanotechnology, due to their unique electrical and mechanical properties. Depending on detailed wrapping-up methods, their electronic properties show a wide spectrum from metals to large-gap semiconductors with band gaps of 1eV. In this thesis, we study various physical properties of carbon nanotubes, including electrical properties and their controlling methods, magnetic properties, and transport characteristics, based on the first-principles density-functional theory and the tight-binding model.