A UCL-led team of researchers has won a grant worth more than £850,000 to develop a new model of energy consumption.
The grant, from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), covers the cost of a three-year project led by Prof Tadj Oreszczyn, director of the UCL Energy Institute (UCL-EI).
The project will involve a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, building scientists and energy system modellers from UCL-EI, UCL Mathematics and elsewhere.
Prof Oreszczyn and his colleagues hope to develop a model of energy consumption that links building and occupant diversity with occupant behaviour.
Recent studies have revealed profound differences in energy use between different groups of occupants – a variability that existing models fail to capture.
The project promises, for the first time, to link behaviour, the housing stock and the energy supply in dynamic, hourly demand-supply system models.
Understanding how, when and why we consume energy is becoming increasingly important as government and industry plan and implement the decarbonisation of the country’s housing stock, a key step in the move toward a low-carbon world.
The terms and conditions of the research may only solve 30% of energy consumption problems. The main or core model that need to be developed is a system that will link practical control system strategies in buildings and equipment operating efficiencies. Although building occupant diversity and occupancy behaviour has a part to play in enegy consumption, a system well developed with effecive control methodolgy will be less affected by occupancy behaviour. I theefore suggest that the terms and conditiorns of the project should be reviewed.
I think that this is a great initiative; I just hope that the group does not ignore the massive amount of work in this area done by CMHC, Canada’s federal housing agency. They have done a great deal of background work that would be useful to this project, but it is easy to ignore good work done elsewhere. CMHC’s Research (now Policy and Research) Division has expertise in most of what is being brought to this project and that mix was one of the major reasons that their research was so good.
Have them search CMHC’s web site at http://www.cmhc.ca for some of the research highlights and for access to the reports.
I am willing to comment on the work, for free, just to help this needed project turn out to be a resounding success.
Jim H. White
System Science Consulting
but formerly
Senior Advisor – Building Science at CMHC