EconomicGrowth&EnergyDemand

From a consumption perspective, energy demand in the UK has continued to rise – showing an increase of 6% over the past 20 years (Barrett et al. 2013). The additional indirect energy use associated with imported goods and services are excluded from territorial accounts of energy and emissions. Therefore, the UK has not seen an absolute decoupling of energy use from economic growth. To address this issue, this project will explore patterns and drivers of energy demand and the role of energy efficiency. This will include developing new approaches (e.g. combining physical and economic measures of output) to decompose the drivers of energy use in the economy combining traditional decomposition techniques with input-output analysis, allowing a more sophisticated analysis of how changes in the pattern of final demand for products, changes in the structure of intermediate demand and improvements in efficiency impact on energy use. This would also involve an analysis of exergy within an input-output (IO) framework and whether this would be a useful approach to explore further potentials for energy efficiency improvements across the economy.