The determinants of residential energy expenditure in Italy

As a large part of primary energy consumption in different countries is related to the residential sector, a reduction in energy consumption at the “household-scale” may determine a significant reduction in the carbon emission at the “country-scale”. Hence, the precise knowledge of the relationships between the household characteristics and the energy consumption/expenditure may serve as basis for policymakers when planning investments aiming to reduce the primary energy consumption in the residential sector. This paper contributes to the existing discussion, focusing on the Italian case study, by analyzing the relationships between the residential energy expenditure and the building factors, socio-demographic variables and appliances. In particular, the impact that the different household characteristics have on per–capita family energy expenditures has been examined commented and compared with the previous literature. The analysis is performed by coupling (a) the ordinary least squares method, to determine the relationship between the variables, (b) the variance inflation factor, to check for multicollinearity issues, and (c) the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, to select suitable variables. Subsequently, a segmentation of the Italian households has been proposed, by using a segmentation-tree approach and the outcomes of the previous analysis.