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Cooking with unclean energy: insight into power shortage in rural areas

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Abstract

Achieving the UN clean energy goal will contribute to the achievement of other sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, the low quality of the power supply is destroying global efforts to introduce clean energy. Specifically, in China, the world’s largest developing country, the rural clean energy plan has been affected by power shortages. It is unclear whether the power shortages are linked to the use of unclean energy sources for cooking by farmers, and it is also unclear what strategies should be adopted to reduce the use of unclean energy for cooking among farmers and the extent to which those strategies will be effective. Thus, this study uses a large sample of data from rural China to assess the quantitative impact of power shortages on unclean energy use in cooking among farmers and identifies the optimal management practices to reduce the probability that farmers use unclean energy in cooking. The results show that (1) unlike farmers who have not suffered from power shortages, farmers who suffer from power shortages tend to use unclean energy for cooking; (2) compared with farmers who suffer from power shortages sometimes, farmers who suffer from power shortages often are more likely to use unclean energy for cooking; and (3) designing local optimization strategies, for example, improving the power supply quality, the infrastructure and livelihood resilience, will reduce the probability that farmers use unclean energy for cooking by 3 ~ 30%. In general, the findings of this study provide valuable evidence for policies that promote global sustainable development.

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Data Availability

Data will be made available on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

UN :

United Nations

PS :

Power Shortage

UEU :

Unclean Energy Use

SDG s :

Sustainable Development Goals

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 22CJY046), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72173133), National Statistical Science Research Project of China (Grant No. 2023LY014), and the Open Fund of Sichuan Province Cyclic Economy Research Center (Grant No. XHJJ-2303). The authors also extend great gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful review and critical comments. Additionally, all authors are very grateful to the Center for Social Science Survey at Sun Yat-sen University who provides the data.

Funding

This research was funded by National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 22CJY046), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72173133), National Statistical Science Research Project of China (Grant No. 2023LY014), and the Open Fund of Sichuan Province Cyclic Economy Research Center (Grant No. XHJJ-2303).

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  1. Xin Deng and Miao Zeng contributed equally to this work and should be regarded as co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Miao Zeng

  2. College of Economics, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, 611130, China

    Kuan Zhang, Qiang He, Yanbin Qi & Xin Deng

  3. College of Management, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, 611130, China

    Dingde Xu

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Zeng, M., Zhang, K., He, Q. et al. Cooking with unclean energy: insight into power shortage in rural areas. Environ Dev Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-04980-0

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