UCL-Energy students build close relationship with DECC

At present, Joel Guilbaud is on a secondment at DECC, and Jenny Love is doing a 3 month project for DECC in the Technical Energy Analysis team.

Joel is currently on a PhD secondment at DECC in the Strategy Directorate. He works in collaboration with James Geddes on the potential of energy storage at utility level. The research encompasses to model the cost of a number of storage technology covering timescales from seconds to months. The project aim is to understand the cost structure of large scale energy storage in order to assess its economic potential in relation to a number of energy pathways.

Jenny explains the project she is working on for DECC, 'Heat pumps are a prominent option for future domestic heating in the UK. The manufacturer 'coefficient of performance', a measurement taken in a laboratory, often does not translate to good performance in the field.

'The findings from Phase 1 of the Energy Saving Trust field trials demonstrated the importance of everything around the actual heat pump machinery - its installation, sizing, operation and other aspects. I am working on part of the UK's contribution to an IEA project about well-performing heat pumps - selecting examples of those whose Seasonal Performance Factors (a measure of performance in-situ) were relatively high, and understanding why. Are the reasons site-specific, or can the good performance be replicated across sites? What can we learn from the results of the same good-examples analysis in other EU countries?'