Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Prayas (Energy Group) jointly organized a roundtable in Delhi on India’s Residential Electricity Consumption.
Electricity consumption in Indian homes has tripled since 2000, and now contributes to about a quarter of the total electricity consumption. However, electrified Indian households, on an average, still consume less than a third of the world average. Rapid electrification, increasing incomes, and technology development are to result in increased appliance ownership and electricity use, which has implications for energy efficiency policies, generation capacity, planning, climate change and environmental pollution. Research on India’s residential electricity consumption has been limited till date — however, this is now changing.
The objective of the round-table was to bring together the different organizations and individuals investigating the factors affecting India’s residential electricity consumption. It can provide an avenue to substantively share recently completed and on-going work as well as discuss challenges and future directions. This can also help identify opportunities for collaboration to enhance the collective knowledge base on India’s residential electricity consumption.
Researchers and practitioners from about 20 organizations attended the event with 8 organizations presenting their work on different areas related to residential electricity consumption like household surveys, meter based monitoring, and feedback based interventions. The round-table’s focus on residential electricity consumption was appreciated as it provided a much-needed platform to bring together people working on this topic. We envisage this to be a regular (annual or biennial) event for researchers/practitioners to share their work on continuous basis, and look forward to building a residential energy end-use community together.
