Urban Water Demand Simulation in Residential and Non-Residential Buildings Based on a CityGML Data Model

Humans’ activities in urban areas put a strain on local water resources. This paper introduces a method to accurately simulate the stress urban water demand in Germany puts on local resources on a single-building level, and scalable to regional levels without loss of detail. The method integrates building geometry, building physics, census, socio-economy and meteorological information to provide a general approach to assessing water demands that also overcome obstacles on data aggregation and processing imposed by data privacy guidelines. Three German counties were used as validation cases to prove the feasibility of the presented approach: on average, per capita water demand and aggregated water demand deviates by less than 7% from real demand data. Scenarios applied to a case region Ludwigsburg in Germany, which takes the increment of water price, aging of the population and the climate change into account, show that the residential water demand has the change of −2%, +7% and −0.4% respectively. The industrial water demand increases by 46% due to the development of economy indicated by GDP per capita. The rise of precipitation and temperature raise the water demand in non-residential buildings (excluding industry) of 1%.

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Factores explicativos de la demanda municipal de agua y efectos en el bienestar de la política tarifaria. Una aplicación a la cuenca del Segura

Studies of Applied Economics ◽

10.25115/eea.v31i2.3341 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 577

Author(s):

Miguel Ángel Tobarra-González

Keyword(s):

Water Demand ◽

Consumer Surplus ◽

Urban Water ◽

Inelastic Behavior ◽

Urban Water Demand ◽

Per Capita ◽

Using Data ◽

Demand Changes ◽

Econometric Approach ◽

Water Tariffs

In this article urban water demand is analyzed using data of 42 municipalities located in the Segura River Basin for the period 2000-2006. The econometric approach shows that price, income and population are the most important variables for explaining urban water demand changes. Water tariffs achieve moderate savings due to the price inelastic behavior of demand (-0,4). This is typical of necessary goods without substitutes. Calculus made shows that the increment in tariffs, necessary to reduce 10% consumption, means a consumer surplus reduction between 8 and 9,5 euros per person (and year). There is also a minimum of water consumption in homes, 84 litres per capita per day that cannot be affected by tariffs. Income and population increments have deeper impact than price for explaining changes in urban water demand. Predictions about these variables are major for a proper hydraulic management.

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Heterogeneity in Domestic Water Demand: An Application of Multilevel Analysis to the City of Valencia (Spain)

Water ◽

10.3390/w13233400 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (23) ◽

pp. 3400

Author(s):

Mónica Maldonado-Devis ◽

Vicent Almenar-Llongo

Keyword(s):

Water Demand ◽

Relevant Information ◽

Urban Water ◽

Average Price ◽

Domestic Water ◽

Household Level ◽

Urban Water Demand ◽

Local Water ◽

Tariff Structure ◽

The City

This paper deals with the question of unobservable heterogeneity and problems of scale in urban water demand. For this purpose, the determinants of domestic water consumption and the elasticities were estimated using a hierarchical model. For our empirical analysis, a household level data panel from Valencia (Spain) between 2009 and 2011 was available. Households were assigned to the city neighbourhoods to which they belong, which allowed us to incorporate the intra-urban scale into the analysis. In the estimate, the average price paid by each household in each bimonthly period was used due to the current tariff structure in Valencia. Regarding our results, there were differences in the consumption between the different neighbourhoods that were not independent of the average price paid by households. We found that 27% of the variability in consumption was explained by differences in household behaviour. In addition, an average price-elasticity in Valencia for all periods of −1.868 was obtained as well as a range of elasticities for the different neighbourhoods between (−1.53 and −1.21). From the results obtained, it is possible to extract relevant information for local water managers in order to apply economic instruments, prices and taxes to urban water demand.

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