Energy transitions across household distributions in northern India

Abstract

This paper investigates sustainable household energy transitions including a reduction in kerosene lamp use and increases in solar home systems and solar lanterns. We use a large and detailed survey of around 9,000 households in northern India in 2015 and 2018. Our key analytical insights focus on inequality across economic and wealth distributions, including the lack of major distributional changes between the two survey waves. We find that a positive relationship between economic resources and solar home system use is driven by the upper end of economic distributions. Kerosene use is also substantially lower for the top of the economic distribution, especially in the 2018 survey. In contrast, economic resources have a weak relationship with solar lantern use. Future policies can be devised with reference to our results showing a more robust relationship between assets, rather than income, and household energy transitions. The stronger influence of assets is evident for a range of asset variables and for a composite wealth index which we construct. Detailed analysis of socio-economic distributions has value for informing policy attempts to target support to constrained households.