The micro-geography of household heating practices in rural Northern China: a community-based approach to exploring energy vulnerability in low-carbon transition

Wang, Shuye 2024. The micro-geography of household heating practices in rural Northern China: a community-based approach to exploring energy vulnerability in low-carbon transition. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Northern rural China experiences large heating demand during winter and severe air pollution and carbon emissions from the incomplete combustion of solid fuels, harming the well-being of the rural population and impeding progress toward low carbon emissions. The Chinese government has pursued a series of measures shifting rural residential heating from solid fuels to clean fuels, particularly electricity and natural gas. Meanwhile, scientific and engineering communities have been improving political interventions and advancing technical solutions to facilitate this heating transition. However, the extent to which political initiatives and technical advancements register with rural households’ living experiences is little researched. This study, therefore, addresses this gap not only by systematically assessing the practical feasibility of state-of-the-art solutions across different domains (engineering, architecture, and policy) but also by examining household heating practices and the real-world application of political initiatives and advanced techniques from a socio-technical perspective. By employing mixed methods embedded in a case study at a community level, this study presents household heating practices in rural homes with both quantitative monitoring and qualitative assessment and shows the practicalities of political and technical solutions in this residential setting. This study demonstrates that transitioning rural household heating from firewood/coal to electricity or natural gas under political initiatives is far less than successful. Electric heating systems, though being widely installed, are seldomly used by rural households for winter heating, while natural gas heaters are actively used, however, being sparsely installed. It also reveals an uneven energy vulnerability and heating poverty, which emerge from a confluence of multiple aspects embedded in the rural way of life, that force rural residents to sacrifice their thermal comfort to manage insufficient heating during winter and to compromise themselves between affordability and sufficiency in heating usage. This study calls for a priority of meeting residents’ essential heating requirements over optimizing heating energy use efficiency, as well as political and technical efforts to achieve a balance between heating sufficiency and affordability. It highlights the practical knowledge of users’ experience and real-world applications of technical solutions and the necessity of incorporating this knowledge into policy-making and technical innovation for mitigating energy vulnerabilities and facilitating heating transition.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Architecture
Funders:	China Scholarship Council
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 November 2024
Last Modified:	20 Nov 2024 16:08
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/173743

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