Australian households use a range of energy sources to power their everyday lives. While many consumers rely on electricity, gas and solar, some also use firewood as a fuel source. Yet there is little up-to-date data available on residential firewood consumption in Australia. For the Australian Government, this presents challenges for devising accurate estimates of firewood consumption for publications such as the Australian Energy Statistics (AES). In the past, estimates of residential firewood consumption have been based on information such as the number of households and number of wood heaters per state. However, there is scope to improve the accuracy and robustness of these estimates by using more recent data and applying a new analytical methodology that considers a larger number of variables.

In FY 2018-19, the CSIRO aimed to improve past estimates of residential firewood consumption by conducting a survey of Australian households using the CSIRO Energise mobile app. The self-reportdata collected through this survey was used to generate estimates of firewood consumption per state/territory based on location and dwelling type. Due to the preliminary nature of this research, however, further work is needed to validate the initial estimates using a larger and more representative sample of consumers. There is also value in repeated surveying of households (i.e. longitudinal data collection) in order to explore changes in firewood consumption over time.To this end, the current research builds on CSIRO’s earlier work with a view to improving the accuracy of residential firewood consumption estimates for the Australian Energy Statistics.

In 2019, two new surveys were conducted – one using the CSIRO Energise app (n = 770 households) and another using an online research panel (n = 4,074) – in order to collect self-report informationon firewood consumption from a larger, more geographically representative sample of Australian households. The survey included general questions about demographics, household characteristics and dwelling factors, as well as more specific questions about the ownership and use of wood-fired appliances for domestic purposes such as heating, cooking and hot water. Importantly, the survey also asked respondents to provide an overall estimate of the total amount of firewood used by their household in the past year, which served as the key outcome variable of interest.