Challenges and Opportunities of Multi-Scale Urban Energy and Water Data
Abstract
Electricity and water are essential material flows through the urban environment and are innately linked. The electricity portfolio of the city dictates the quantity of embedded materials within that electricity, both air emissions and water, and has implications in adaptation and resilience to climate change. Additionally, the consumption of drinking water indirectly consumes energy through its treatment and distribution. As city governments begin to recognize their essential role in climate mitigation and adaptation and pursue resource conservation strategies, there is an opportunity to provide essential research and support in evaluating the progress of cities. Additionally, as residential smart metering of electricity and water becomes more widely implemented, the big data associated with these resources creates challenges and opportunities. Using data from the Chicago Metropolitan Area, we identify trends and correlations of electricity and water usage at the residential scale. Through the analysis, we evaluate an essential part of the energy-water nexus using a bottom-up methodology and compare the results to a more traditional top-down assessment of the energy-water nexus. We utilize a unique data set of zip-code level electricity and water demand, paired with regional energy-for-water, water-for-energy, and air emissions estimations to determine the magnitude of embedded resources from an urban metabolism perspective. The results of the analysis provide important insights on the relationship of electricity and water at the residential household scale and identify challenges of city-level decision making regarding resource conservation. We highlight current data gaps and identify disparities both temporally and spatially in aggregating multiple datasets to understand the indirect consumption of electricity demand. The work highlights the importance of understanding electricity and water flows from both meter-level and city-level perspectives.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H51F..02C
- Keywords:
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- 0493 Urban systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1878 Water/energy interactions;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY