Subsidy allocation for residential building energy retrofit: A perspective of families' incomes

High household end -user services demand of high -income families results in higher energy consumption compared with low-income families, indicating high -income families may save more energy from similar building energy retrofitting (BER) strategies. Therefore, current BER subsidy policies, which consider technique indicators and ignore families' income, will make high -income families' recovery costs faster, and can't maximize the incentive for residents' BER awareness. To formulate a equitable and efficient subsidy policies considering families' income, this study selected Chongqing as the study case and employed propensity scores matching method to evaluate BER's actual energy savings performance for families with different incomes. Meanwhile, the BER subsidies are reallocated based on the dynamic cost payback period. The results indicated that, following BER, the energy savings of high -income families (7.36 kWh/m2) were higher than the mid- (3.96 kWh/m2) and low-income (3.25 kWh/m2) families. Notably, under current subsidy policies, the cost payback period of low-income families is nearly 2.55 and 3.14 times of the mid -income (6.61 years) and high -income (5.37 years) groups, respectively. This study suggests a subsidy of 32.57 yuan/m2, 20.27 yuan/m2, and 15.38 yuan/m2 for low-income, mid -income, and high -income families, respectively. These results provide novel insights into the actual energy -saving performance of residential buildings and help policymakers to formulate fair subsidy policies.