Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 6: Poster

SOE 6.16: Poster

Monday, March 20, 2017, 17:00–20:00, P2-OG4

Global Urban Energy Efficiency: Insights from scaling laws — •Ramana Gudipudi¹, Mathias K. B. Lüdeke¹, and Jürgen P. Kropp^1,2 — ¹Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, 14412, Germany — ²Department of Geo- and Environmental Sciences, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, 14476, Germany

The scaling properties of total urban energy use with city size were investigated based on a sample of 223 cities worldwide in developing and developed countries for the first time. We found sub-linear scaling of energy with population (slope = 0.88) but the quality of the fit appears to be relatively low (R² = 0.83) for the logarithmic variables. This can be significantly improved (R²=0.9) by dividing the cities sample into two subsets separated by their degree of industrialization. Furthermore, it appears that – independent from the chosen industrialization threshold – the more service oriented cities scale almost linearly with size because of their infrastructure lock-in behavior while the industrialized cities with nascent infrastructure show a significantly lower exponent. According to this analysis, the energy consumption of larger industrialized cities is typically more energy efficient per cap than that of smaller cities which is good news given the strong global urbanization trend. The results also underscore the energy consumption traits of richer service oriented cities where size does not influence the energy consumption.