The energy consumption of residential space heating had experienced a dramatic increase, driven by the continuous income growth and rigid need for thermal comfort (Guo et al., 2015; Ma et al., 2019). In OECD countries, space heating accounts for 45% of the total buildings energy consumption (IEA, 2017). Numerous studies have shown that heating is an important method to regulate indoor temperature, protect residents’ health, and adapt to climate change (Deschenes, 2014). However, space heating is also a major source of air pollution and energy consumption. Biomass is still far the dominant fuel when a global picture is considered (Uerge-Vorsatz et al., 2015), especially in developing countries, thus energy consumption for space heating will cause relatively serious environmental pollution and health problem (Kerimray et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2019). In order to provide affordable and healthy space heating services while also reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, previous literature has made great contributions on measuring the space-heating energy demand (Berger and Worlitschek, 2018; Fazeli et al., 2016; Olonscheck et al., 2011; Zhang and Zhou, 2019), projecting energy consumption under various scenarios (Hedegaard et al., 2018) and other aspects. However, several questions remain unanswered. First, different developed countries adopt various space-heating patterns, but there is a lack of a comprehensive summary of national history and experience, which is very valuable to help developing countries choose their own patterns. Second, due to the diversity of space-heating patterns, there are still difficulties in data and methods in measuring the energy consumption for space heating, especially for developing countries (Guo et al., 2019). Thus, although there are many studies on comparisons of household energy consumption across countries(Wang et al., 2020), there are still fewer international comparisons based on heating energy consumption (Uerge-Vorsatz et al., 2015). Third, economic development, climate change and other important factors are changing people’s demand for spacing heating, which calls for more attention to energy consumption prediction research. For instance, studies found that global warming would reduce the future demand for heating (Zhang and Zhou, 2019). But the trend of increasing domestic floor area per capita and declining of household size globally has a significant impact on energy demand (Ellsworth-Krebs, 2019), and with the improvement of economic level and frequent extreme weathers in winter due to climate change, the newly installed heating system will lead to an increase in energy demand, especially in developing countries. Meanwhile, studies have pointed out that low temperatures and high humidity will promote the spread of Covid-19 (Xu et al., 2020), thus people’s concern about health may lead to an increase in the need for heating. Fourth, in order to meet the demand for space heating while reducing green gas emission, more and more new technologies for renewable energies and intelligent optimization are implemented in space heating. An edge-cutting introduction in this aspect is also very valuable for the government to make policies. In all, there are still some significant issues in energy consumption for residential space heating that need to be explored and discussed.
This special issue aims to present advance studies, either original research or review studies, in this field including but not limited to the following topics: History and experience of space heating in different countries; Measuring heating energy consumption based on micro-data or big data; Comparative analysis of heating energy demand across countries; Heterogeneity analysis of residential heating energy consumption; The role of renewable energy in reducing heating energy consumption and pollutant emissions; Heating and residential building design; Technology progresses in space heating and their impact on energy consumption; Heating energy consumption prediction based on different scenarios; Changes in heating patterns after the Covid-19.