Subsidy allocation for residential building energy retrofit: A perspective of families' incomes

Kairui You, Queena K. Qian, Weiguang Cai*, Xia Wang, Henk Visscher

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

High household end-user services demand of high-income families results in higher energy consumption compared with low-income families, indicating high-income families may save more energy from similar building energy retrofitting (BER) strategies. Therefore, current BER subsidy policies, which consider technique indicators and ignore families' income, will make high-income families' recovery costs faster, and can't maximize the incentive for residents’ BER awareness. To formulate a equitable and efficient subsidy policies considering families’ income, this study selected Chongqing as the study case and employed propensity scores matching method to evaluate BER's actual energy savings performance for families with different incomes. Meanwhile, the BER subsidies are reallocated based on the dynamic cost payback period. The results indicated that, following BER, the energy savings of high-income families (7.36 kWh/m2) were higher than the mid- (3.96 kWh/m2) and low-income (3.25 kWh/m2) families. Notably, under current subsidy policies, the cost payback period of low-income families is nearly 2.55 and 3.14 times of the mid-income (6.61 years) and high-income (5.37 years) groups, respectively. This study suggests a subsidy of 32.57 yuan/m2, 20.27 yuan/m2, and 15.38 yuan/m2 for low-income, mid-income, and high-income families, respectively. These results provide novel insights into the actual energy-saving performance of residential buildings and help policymakers to formulate fair subsidy policies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number105317
Number of pages11
JournalSustainable Cities and Society
Volume104
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Actual energy savings performance
  • Building energy efficiency standard
  • Building energy retrofit
  • Income
  • Subsidy allocation

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