Funder: RCUK/EPSRC
Duration: 01 August 2016 to 31 May 2018
Staff Involved: Professor NJ Hewitt
The End Use Energy Demand centres are a £30m investment of the RCUK Energy Programme, with over 200 researchers across over 25 institutions running from 2013-2018. In 2015 it was agreed that collaborative work across the six centres on key themes would add extra value to the centres' work. 5 collaborative projects are outlined here, of the type that will run in the remaining funding period (spring '16 - spring '18). The funding is flexible so that the Directors can use it to greatest effect.
1. Analysing SuperMarket Energy Data - will combine the knowledge and skills of three centres CEE, CSEF and i-STUTE to create a clearer picture of supermarket energy use in the UK which can then inform policy and industry on future energy demand decisions.
2. Establishing a research programme on exergy economics - CIED and CIE-Map centre experts will combine to raise awareness and build capacity of this emerging field of research (which focusses on energy that can do work as opposed to all energy expended) with a view to laying foundations for future work in the field.
3. Heat pump and thermal energy storage technologies for industrial energy demand reduction - This project will combine the expertise of three of the centre (CSEF, i-STUTE and CIE-MAP) to consider further the potential contribution of heat pumps, sorption refrigeration and thermal energy storage technologies for energy efficiency and decarbonisation of the industrial sector. The project will also identify future research and development needs for the improvement of the thermoeconomic performance of these technologies.
4. Conceptualising Infrastructures, innovation and demand - DEMAND and CIED are both concerned with innovations in infrastructures and practice, and with the implications of these dynamics for energy and mobility demand. Whilst the two centres approach this topic from different angles, current research - for instance, on city scale innovation, on pathways to district and home heating, on novel nstitutional/ infrastructural conjunctions (e.g. around electric vehicles), and on peaks and patterns of demand - is generating a series of important cross-cutting questions to do with space, time and scale.
5. Invisible energy policy: new opportunities for intervention - Many different areas of government policy - health, education, defence, welfare and economic policy to name but a few, have tangible consequences for energy demand and for patterns of mobility. DEMAND and CIE-MAP will combine forces to help articulate and identify critical areas of what we describe as 'invisible' energy policy.