In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, “Drivers of change in US residential energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, 1990–2015,” a team of researchers from the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) outlined several factors that have contributed to this decrease, highlighting efficiencies in new home construction, energy consumption and household appliances, as well as less emissions in electric generation.
“Without the reductions in GHG intensity of electricity, residential GHG emissions would have been higher,” growing by 30 percent from 1990 to 2015 rather than the current 6 percent, says YSE PhD student Peter Berrill from the Center for Industrial Ecology, who co-authored the paper with Ken Gillingham, associate professor of economics at YSE, and former YSE faculty member Edgar Hertwich.
Using detailed data gathered from multiple U.S. housing surveys and energy reviews, Berrill found positives in less GHG-intensive electricity, but added that it’s “too risky” to rely on only electricity to decarbonize the residential sector in the coming decades. This, he says, is due to other troubling trends: population growth; reduction of household size, including more senior citizens living on their own; substantial increases in floor area per house in recent decades; and increased access to residential cooling.
To stem the tide against those trends, Berrill sees a need for societal change.
