Rural residential energy-saving in China: Role of village morphology and villagers' daily activities. (15th December 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Huang, Zishuo; Liu, Yingfang; Wang, Yi
• Is Part Of: Journal of cleaner production. Volume 379:Part 1(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-12-15
• Subjects: Building energy consumption -- Time geography -- Agent-based method -- Village morphology -- Household structure; Factory and trade waste -- Management -- Periodicals; Manufactures -- Environmental aspects -- Periodicals; Déchets industriels -- Gestion -- Périodiques; Usines -- Aspect de l'environnement -- Périodiques; 628.5
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134707
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0959-6526

Abstract

Abstract: The impact of village morphology on habitats' daily spatiotemporal behavior and building energy consumption is still vague. This research aims to propose a method to reveal how and to what extent village morphology and residents' demographic structure influence farmhouses' occupancy rate and energy consumption. For this purpose, a combined time geography and building energy consumption method was proposed to disclose the relationship among residents' family roles, village morphology and household energy consumption. To explore the occupancy rate of farm-houses with different family members in different village morphology, resident types based on field research (retrospective interviews and aggregation behavior observation) were formulated. Residents with similar time-space behavior seemed as an "agent" and then a specified number of agents are combined into different families for ideal experiments. By placing different households in different villages for multi-factor cross-experiment, the occupancy rates of different households are obtained based on individual time-space behavior patterns, and then the energy consumption of each household under different scenarios is obtained by combining building energy consumption simulation. In addition, the relationship between resident's disposable personal time, local public space' quality, and the house occupancy rate was analyzed. Combined with a case study in Shanghai with 417 valid questionnaires, it can be seen that the method proposed in this paper is effective and villages with high quality public space have the potential to reduce household energy consumption from 2.17% to 38.82% for diverse families. The quantitative result indicated that the occupancy rate is mainly influenced by residents having more disposable personal time, and such space-time behavior is sensitive to village morphology. This study proposed a combined method and case evidence to systematically analyze the complex relationship between resident behavior, the village morphology, and household energy consumption, thus contributing to the sustainable plan and design of the community spatial system. Graphical abstract: Image 1 Highlights: Proposed systematic approach to reveal the relationship between morphology and energy. Energy-saving effect of public space is revealed from villagers' behavior chain. The influence of the village morphology on energy consumption is between 2.17% and 38.82%. Alternative mode of villager's space usage in disposable personal time was proved.