Via Brendon Slotterback’s Twitter, here’s a chart showing Minneapolis’ energy use and “built square footage” (i.e. the total amount of buildings) over time:

As Slotterback says:

Minneapolis’ total electricity use has declined 4% since ’06 while total square footage has increased 5.5%.

At the global scale, preventing out of control climate change requires de-linking GDP from CO2 emissions. At the local scale, it’s nice to see that at least we’re (kinda sorta) delinking energy use from population growth.  I’d bet much of this has to do with improved efficiency and/or smaller units.

PS. How on earth does one get “total built square footage data”? Tax rolls?