The impact of energy consumption on quality of life in the world: methodological aspects of evaluation

Abstract

The high quality of life in the modern sense is directly related to energy consumption and associated with the provision of «clean» food products and environment, comfortable housing, public and private transport. Increasing the availability of energy for the developing countries allows their residents to live longer and more comfortably. At the same time, in the developed European countries with high quality of life, energy consumption is decreasing due to the implementation of energy efficiency and energy saving policies. The Human Development Index, the world’s best-known and most widely used integrated assessment of quality of life, does not include energy consumption indicators. The aim of our research is to study the relationship between energy consumption and quality of life, and prove the need to consider energy consumption indicators in order to improve the methodology framework for assessing quality of life. Using the method of cluster analysis, 77 countries of the world are grouped according to a set of indicators that characterize income, energy consumption, use of renewable energy sources, and CO2 emissions. As a result, the relationship between the level of human development, which is a universal characteristic of quality of life, and these indicators was identified and evaluated. It has been proved that the most prosperous countries in terms of quality of life and energy use are those in which relatively low indicators of primary energy consumption and CO2 emission are combined with high incomes and human development level. The progressive structure of energy consumption ensures the achievement of a higher quality of living, while high energy consumption is not a sufficient condition for this. Against the background of low levels of total primary energy consumption and GDP per capita, CO2 emissions, as well as a low share of renewable energy in total energy consumption, high quality of life is present mainly in the «new» EU member states, which provide it through rational energy consumption. The average level of human development is inherent in a group of countries of the former USSR (which includes Ukraine), as well as some countries in Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. At the same time, countries such as China and South Korea are reducing energy consumption owing to technological progress and have a positive dynamics of human development indicators. Instead, low levels of energy consumption in the former Soviet Union and Latin America are due to insufficient sustainability of economic and social development, human development in particular. The obtained results substantiate the need to improve the methodology for assessing the quality of life taking into consideration energy consumption indicators.

Problems of improving the quality of life of miners in mining regions on the example of the Kemerovo region (Kuzbass) and ways to solve them

“…Ecological and climatic indicators of quality of life: • state of the environment • environmental safety • power consumption level There are a number of studies to identify the relationship between the parameters of quality of life, energy consumption and environmental safety. They argue that uncontrolled energy consumption, especially from non-renewable sources, creates an excessive burden on the environment and threatens to increase social inequality both within and between countries [6].…”

Energy Consumption and Human Well-Being: A Systematic Review

“…The overwhelming majority of TD studies provide evidence for a positive relationship between energy use and well-being, using a wide variety of measures of well-being and energy use [35,41,42,47,58,59,61,64,65,72,[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82]. Most also report diminishing marginal gains in well-being with increasing energy use-a saturation effect-resulting in negligible increases in well-being at high levels of energy use [35,41,42,47,58,59,61,64,65,72,[74][75][76][77][78].…”

“…Nadimi and Tokimatsu [77,78] propose using a sigmoid function, where they found that in pre-developing countries with very low energy use, an increase in energy use would not yield high gains in quality of life. Many papers also draw attention to significant inter-country variance in well-being for a given level of energy use [35,47,59,74,75,80], arguing that energy use is a necessary but not sufficient condition for need satisfaction and that provisioning factors play an important role that is typically overlooked, leading to overestimating the importance of energy use [47]. An implication of the observed variance is that countries "transform" energy into well-being at different levels of efficiency [59,74].…”

“…For BU studies, Baltruszewicz et al [66] call for more studies on often understudied countries in the Global South. Generally, many authors call for studying different country contexts [71,73,80,81,87].…”

Optimizing Fluid Flow Cooling in Gas Transmission Systems

“…To prevent hydrate formation, the gas temperature should always be kept above the flow hydrate temperature. Due to the fact that the gas temperature at the end of the pipeline of each station is lower due to heat exchange with the soil, so the risk of hydrate formation at the end of the pipeline will be higher [6,7]. Also in cold regions of garlic and in cold seasons of the year, the risk of hydrate formation is much higher than other seasons, and the issue of cooling the exhaust gas from each station should be investigated more carefully.…”