Obsolescence in Urban Energy Infrastructures: The Influence of Scaling Laws on Consumption Forecasting

Water societal metabolism in the Yucatan Peninsula. The impact of climate change on the recharge of groundwater by 2030

“…Metabolic and consumption values associated to each productive sector depend on the relative characteristics of the sector and its weight within the society. In general, similar societies will have similar patterns across sectors, either productive or domestic, with sublinear, linear or superlinear scaling exponents which suggest different levels of efficiency in the use of resources and growth (Bettencourt et al, 2007;Horta-Bernús and Rosas-Casals, 2015;West, 2017;West and Brown, 2005). In the same way that a modern society requires more exosomatic energy, it also occurs with water uses.…”

Urban and Rural—Population and Energy Consumption Dynamics in Local Authorities within England and Wales

“…This is in agreement with the overall predictions made by Bettencourt et al [21] that properties reflecting the production of wealth and information exhibit super-linear and those linked with built form and infrastructure in cities display sub-linear scaling with population. Although it appears fairly intuitive that there would be systematic infrastructural savings in total consumption when delivering to larger number of people on a more concentrated network (following a similar analogy to that of road networks for urban gas and electricity networks [28]), a Spanish study of electricity consumption across Andalusian settlements reports a slightly super-linear scaling [32] suggesting that unlike purely physical infrastructural characteristics, e.g., built area or length of infrastructural networks, network type, and implementation or perhaps user behavior may influence consumption behavior making its scaling context dependent and as such country specific. It should, however, be noted that the Spanish settlements considered in the study are considerably smaller than those normally considered urban, i.e., compliant with such scaling laws, with a population range of between 200 and 704,114 with the majority having less than 10,000 inhabitants.…”

“…The availability of free and publicly accessible data on a range of city indicators has since provided opportunities to investigate the existence of similar scaling behaviors across different countries and for various other indicators including but not limited to the area of the city [24][25][26], length and area of infrastructure (e.g., length of road networks [27][28][29][30], electricity cables [21], etc. ), and CO 2 emissions and energy dissipation [16,28,31,32]. These studies also make the observation that certain properties consistently exhibit specific scaling regimes with metrics describing built infrastructure showing sub-linear scaling, demonstrative of increasing efficiencies in larger cities, and those descriptive of individual interactions and processes, i.e., wealth, information, etc., displaying super-linear scaling.…”

The efficient, the intensive, and the productive: Insights from urban Kaya scaling

“…A similar study for European cities depicted super-linear scaling [12]. Studies on household electricity consumption in Germany and Spain revealed an almost linear scaling [4,15]. With respect to energy consumed and the subsequent emissions from urban transportation at a household level in the USA, Glaeser & Kahn [16] found a sub-linear scaling between population size and gasoline consumption; while another study depicted a super-linear scaling of emissions with population size [17].…”