Electricity, Population, and Climate: Modeling Change in Alaska Towns and Villages

Electricity, water, and fuel consumption of arctic Alaska towns and villages show substantial year–to–year variation. An integrated data framework supports statistical modeling of annual variations in electricity use (since 1990) as a function of variations in climate, price, community population and unique characteristics of 42 Alaska towns and villages. We find that community population, changing due to natural increase and net migration, provides the strongest single predictor of the amount of electricity used by a community each year. Net of population, winter temperatures also show statistically significant effects, as does an overall upwards trend. Electricity prices exhibit different effects in different places. Analysis of more limited data on community water use also finds significant population and temperature effects. The approach taken here, mixed-effects modeling of multiple time series with autoregressive errors, is recently developed and not previously applied to arctic data. Yielding empirically-based estimates of relationships across domains, it opens new doors for integrated analysis of climate and human-dimensions data.