Urban scaling of water and electricity demand across the United States

Abstract

As urban populations continue to grow, ensuring an adequate supply of water and electricity will be imperative. However, these resources are generally extracted in rural areas, creating tension during periods of limited availability. It has been argued, however, that urban areas are more efficient users of various resources, in spite of their large populations. Here, we test this argument for water and electricity consumption across 46 US cities. Leveraging urban scaling theory, we show that water and electricity consumption scale sublinearly with population. This suggests that cities are using water and electricity more efficiently as their population increases. Further, the results show that this sublinear scaling exists regardless of season or year. Nonetheless, there were cities that deviated from the expected consumption value that would have been predicted by this model. We explored the role that precipitation and temperature might have on these deviates and found that temperature, in particular, can help explain why certain cities consume more electricity than expected based on their population. Understanding the relationship between consumption patterns and population is critical for planning investments for future infrastructure systems that will need to service higher populations with more limited resources.