Estimating Uncertainty in Household Energy Footprints

Summary We develop a methodology to characterize and quantify uncertainty in relating consumption to production in household energy footprints. This uncertainty arises primarily from inconsistencies between national accounts and household surveys and, to a smaller extent, from using aggregated sectors. Researchers may introduce significant inaccuracies by ignoring these inconsistencies when reporting household footprints. We apply the methodology to India and Brazil, where we find the size of this uncertainty to be higher than 20% of footprints at most income levels. We expect that previous estimates for these countries may have been overestimated due to these inconsistencies. Other knowledge gaps, such as inaccuracies in multiregional input‐output tables and household surveys, add further uncertainty beyond our estimates.