Simulating urban form and energy consumption in the pearl river delta under different development strategies

The rapid growth of China's energy consumption has resulted in many problems in this country. Chinese government has realized the necessity to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. This study presents a model that integrates the support vector regression (SVR) and cellular automata (CA) to simulate the urban forms and to estimate the corresponding energy consumptions in one of the most developed regions in China, the Pearl River Delta (PRD). We simulated four scenarios to assess the impacts of different development strategies on urban forms and the related energy consumptions. The result indicates that land demand is more sensitive to the change of economic structure rather than energy consumption. The comparison of different simulated scenarios suggests that promoting low energy consuming industries is the most effective strategy to balance the economic development and energy and land consumptions.