Scaling laws and electricity consumption in cities: a sectoral view

Abstract

With the use of electricity being increasingly concentrated in urban areas it becomes important to understand the influence of cities, and their size, on patterns of consumption. We tested the application of the scaling law to the Portuguese urban system, across time and municipalities, with special focus on the sectoral consumption of electricity from 1994 until 2009. Results showed that the scaling law is not suitable to describe a city’s electricity consumption throughout the years. In the cross-sectional results, the scaling law proved to be applicable for all cases, although the scaling exponent varies both in time and across sectors. For the residential sector the decrease of the scaling exponent might be related with the electrificationof the energy system and with the increase of average income. For the service sector the scaling exponent was fairly constant, above 1, during the 16 years of the study. The largest variation was found for the industrial sector whose scaling exponent decreased 15–20% in the time frame analyzed, though in this sector electricity consumption appeared to be the one with the weakest relation with city size.