A socio-technical, longitudinal study of carbon use in buildings
Contact:carb@ucl.ac.uk
EPSRC Grant Reference:
GR/S94377/01
Investigators:
Fin. Director Prof KJ Lomas,
Res. Director Prof T Oreszczyn,
IC Ward,
Prof SC Guy,
Dr D Shipworth.
Project Partners:
National Energy Services,
Improvement & Development Agency,
Leicester City Council,
Yorkshire Forward,
Sustainable Development Commission,
E.ON,
The Rudloe Centre for Climate Change,
Connell Mott Macdonald,
Town & Country Planning Assoc (TCPA)
Past efforts to reduce carbon emissions from the existing buildings have had limited success.
Reasons for this include:
- the absence of a transparent and validated strategy for modelling energy use in the nations non-domestic
building stock;
- a poor understanding of how people use energy in buildings, how they interact with new technology and
how they respond to socio-technical energy conservation initiatives;
- a chronic shortage of openly available energy use data matched with descriptors of physical form,
occupant characteristics and the installed appliances and services;
- the absence of useable models for benchmarking, targeting and monitoring energy
use in communities.
Our vision is to create an innovative, public domain, socio-technical model of energy use
in buildings applicable at national, regional, city and community level. It will predict current
carbon emissions and the changes resulting from energy efficiency measures, the deployment of
renewable energy technologies and the use of non-technical interventions. The model will be
developed, validated and demonstrated using both existing data and new data collected in 4 towns
from buildings which are representative of the nation's occupant/building stock profile. Potentially
effective socio-technical interventions will be implemented and the long term impact monitored.
Innovative disseminations routes are to be explored. The open architecture of the national model,
the functioning community model and the data archive will be of immense value to all those with a
stake in a low-carbon future.