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The rebound effects of energy-efficient air conditioners: buy more, bigger, or use longer?

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Abstract

To track the driving forces of rebound effects, the household electricity consumption of air conditioner (AC) was decomposed into the number, power size, and operating hours of AC. A set of regression models was built to find the influence pathways of increasing electricity consumption. Then, a two-stage decision-making process of AC purchase was studied to find the target customers of energy-efficient AC, using the joint estimation of logistic and zero-truncated negative binomial regression models. Data of 371 households in Hsinchu County in Taiwan were used based on the questionnaire survey of the household energy consumption behavior in 2018. Estimated results indicated that households having energy-efficient AC tend to install larger-power size ones causing the electricity consumption of AC to increase. Oversized AC was the main driving force of rebound effects. Contrarily, the using time of AC was not the key influence factor on electricity consumption. Estimated results also indicated that households living in urban apartments, especially for those with large floor area, would have higher probability of choosing energy-efficient AC and would install a greater number of that.

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Notes

  1. Hsinchu County is in north-western Taiwan. After the founding of Hsinchu Science Park in 1980, a large number of high-tech industries began to grow and expand in Hsinchu County which attracted workers coming to work and settle in the county. Compared to other cities or counties, Hsinchu County is a new developing region combining the traditional Hakka cultural and young households of high-tech workers. The multicultural contributes the diversity of the sample survey.

  2. The second electricity-consuming appliance was lighting, using 20% of residential electricity consumption, and following were TV (9%) and refrigerator (7%). The electricity consumption of other appliances was less than 5% according to Su (2019).

  3. The power size was originally asked with the unit of refrigeration ton (RT) in the questionnaire survey. RT is a unit of power used in Taiwan to describe the heat extraction capacity of air conditioning equipment.

  4. Count data is a type of data in which the observations can take only the non-negative integer values {0, 1, 2, 3, …}. When count data are treated as a random variable, the Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial distributions are commonly used to represent its distribution.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Bertoldi and the four anonymous reviewers for their comments. I also thank Mr. Jhong-Han Li for the practical suggestions of this research, and Ms. Monica Peng and Ms. Lilliam Lin of the Stoics Market Research Consultancy for the survey assistance.

Funding

The work was supported by the Bureau of Energy in Taiwan with the grant number 110-E0401 and the Newsys Environmental Technology, Inc., with the grant number 201858N0044A-01.

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  1. Industrial Technology Research Institute, 195, Sec. 4, Chung-Hsing Rd., Chutung, Hsinchu, 310, Taiwan

    Yu-Wen Su

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Su, YW. The rebound effects of energy-efficient air conditioners: buy more, bigger, or use longer?. Energy Efficiency 15, 29 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-022-10034-z

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