Abstract
The formulation of feasible and pragmatic policies that mitigate climate change would require a thorough understanding of the interconnectivity that exists between environment, energy, and the composition of our settlements both urban and rural. This study explores the patterns of energy consumption in England and Wales by investigating consumption behavior within domestic and transport sectors as a function of city characteristics, such as population, density, and density distribution for 346 Local Authority Units (LAU). Patterns observed linking energetic behavior of these LAUs to their respective population and area characteristics highlight some distinctly contrasting consumption behaviors within urban and rural zones. This provides an overview of the correlation between urban/rural status, population, and energy consumption and highlights points of interest for further research and policy intervention. The findings show that energy consumption across cities follows common power law scaling increasing sub-linearly with their population regardless of their urban/rural classification. However, when considering per capita and sector specific consumptions, decreasing per capita consumption patterns are observed for growing population densities within more uniformly populated urban LAUs. This is while rural and sparsely populated LAUs exhibit sharply different patterns for gas, electricity, and transport per capita consumption.
Highlights
The year 2009 saw a subtle and yet fundamentally significant change of the world
While the exponents estimated for the transport fuel consumption do agree within their respective standard errors for both rural and urban regions and they both scale sub-linearly, it can be seen from Figure 3 that absolute rural road transport fuel consumption in general is higher within the rural Local Authority Units (LAU)
The connection between population and energy consumption across the 346 local authorities in England and Wales shows a mostly sub-linear nature. 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
Summary
The year 2009 saw a subtle and yet fundamentally significant change of the world. United Nation. In a decidedly different approach to cities, through a series of analyses based on large urban datasets pertaining to the United States, China, and Europe, Bettencourt and West [20] and Bettencourt et al [21], put forward the notion of “universal features” with special emphasis put on size of the city, mostly expressed and represented as the total population of inhabitants, as the primary determinant of urban characteristics with its geography, design, and history to follow Their observation notes that cities’ properties averaged at a macroscale, e.g., number of patents, crimes reported, GDP, etc., scales with their population through simple power laws in a range of sub- to super-linear relations [22,23]. The following explores the existence of similar power law relations linking the domestic and transport consumption with population and population density at a local authority level in a UK context and investigates whether and how the degree of urbanization of these administrative units impacts the dynamics of consumption with respect to population and what implications may arise as a result of these differences between urban and rural local authority units (LAU)
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