UCL Energy Institute living laboratory

With the support of community platform Carbon Culture , a smart widget illustrates the daily energy consumption with translated financial and carbon costs.

By clicking on the widget, users can discover more about the work undertaken to improve energy efficiency and even allow data to be downloaded for further analysis. Simon Buller, UCL Energy Institute Manager commented: ‘This is a great opportunity for us to be more transparent about our energy consumption and explore further ways to become more efficient. Most importantly having collected a year’s worth of baseline data we can now experiment with some innovative interventions and use Central House where we are based, as a living laboratory’.

One innovative intervention is the work taking place with Cisco. The Cisco Future Cities project is an exciting new collaboration between UCL, Imperial College, and Cisco. Within UCL, the research spans Computer Science researching Internet of Things technologies, and the UCL Energy Institute researching smart energy. These two areas come together in the study of Demand Side Response from commercial buildings.

The research is exploring how Cisco's EnergyWise Protocol can be implemented in ways that support DSR in commercial buildings while simultaneously supporting occupant comfort. The research is looking to develop and test a range of pervasive sensor systems for monitoring standard and emerging environmental variables influencing occupant thermal comfort, and linking the data from these sensors through to real time operational control in a way that lets individual occupants manage their local environment. The intention is to use the inherent capacity of EnergyWise  to deliver progressive power-down management services in response to signals from local distribution networks whilst minimising impact on occupants. The outcomes of this a future projects will be reported in due course.