An Energy Analysis of Household Consumption : Changing Patterns of Direct and Indirect Use in India

The book takes a socio-economic approach to analyzing the energy system and energy consumption in India from a household perspective. In addition, the work incorporates two crucial aspects often ignored by many traditional modeling approaches that are characteristic of most developing countries, namely the importance of non-commercial sources of energy, mostly biofuels, and the very large diversity in the patterns of energy use in households with widely diverging lifestyles and well-being. Adopting a household perspective allows for analyzing how energy use and consumption patterns are linked with the quality of life of individual households or persons and provides a novel view of the energy system and development in India. The work makes a first step in identifying key driving forces and some important trends in technical, economic, demographic, and lifestyle changes that have an impact on the patterns and use of energy within the country over the last couple of decades.