Energy Minister Visits Sussex

The Minister of State for Energy, Charles Hendry MP, visited my research group (the Sussex Energy Group) at the University of Sussex on Monday. My colleague Adrian Smith and I have posted some reflections on his Q&A session with staff and students on the Grassroots Innovations blog - with a particular emphasis on the roles of local communities in the UK energy transition.

A Relu/SUE workshop, London (27 Oct 2010)

I went yesterday to a workshop organised by Relu (Rural Economy and Land Use Programme) and EPSRC (SUE Programme) on crossing the divide between 'urban and rural research'. The day focused on the interdisciplinarity and research practice that both programmes embarked upon and had an interesting networking section around lunchtime where questions were asked on specific projects summarised by A2 posters. The CLUES poster earned a great deal of interest from both the Relu and SUE research communities - interestingly, many Relu teams thought that our topic is worth investigating in a rural context too. So, watch out this space! or...bear this in mind when you start thinking about your next proposal! Three projects are worth investigating further by CLUES:

1. ReVISIONS SUE2 (led by Cambridge University) models scenarios to 2050 around three main areas: Planning/Policy, Economic growth (or not!) and Infrastructure/ Technology. This project started in 2008 and is due to complete in March 2012.
2. Urban Futures SUE1 (led by Pr Chris Rogers at Manchester University) developed four scenarios called Policy Reform, Market Forces, Fortress World and New Sustainability Paradigm.
3. IDCOP SUE1(led by Southampton University) focused on the refurbishment of the urban existing stock (mainly in multi-occupancy and medium to high rise buildings) in terms of energy efficiency and technology innovation.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

EPSRC Sustainable Urban Environments - the four new projects

Yesterday the four new projects funded under the EPSRC SUE3 programme were brought together to discuss synergies. They are all highly interdisciplinary projects and will raise interesting issues about how this can be made to work successfully. In addition to CLUES, the other three projects are:
STEP-CHANGE - a transport-focussed project bringing together qualitative longtitudinal research on a specific cohort of households with mathematical modelling on travel patterns; this hopes to crack the problem of how behavioural change occurs. CLUES is also planning to marry some modelling work with qualitative research (in our case, via case studies).
RETROFIT 2050 - a project using Foresight and scenario techniques together with GIS modelling at the regional scale to look at energy, waste and water.  CLUES is also developing scenarios so we hope to collaborate on this aspect.
SECURE - a project looking at the integration of transport, energy and ecosystems at the regional scale with modelling at three time points: 2011, 2016 and 2050. In the energy area, they will be scaling up from existing intiatives in a technique similar to the CLUES approach.
The four teams plan to stay in touch and share lessons on their interdisciplinary research, both methodologically and in terms of findings. There was also some initial discussion of multi/inter/transdisciplinarity and reference to the work of Julie Thompson Klein, which could prove useful.
Yvonne Rydin, UCL

Europe in the new energy world order

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

I went to one of the public lectures at the LSE the other day. The lecture was part of the LSE European Institute and APCO Worldwide Perspectives on Europe Series and was given by Lykke Friis, Danish Minister for Climate and Energy and Minister for Gender Equality. Ms Friis, a charismatic and young minister delivered a speech about the emergence of energy politics from low to high European politics and Europe's chances to prosper in this new energy world.

The cold war era was characterised by a bipolarity based on ideologies and nuclear arms. The post cold war era will increasingly be defined by energy. Power and economic welfare will depend on a country's or region's access to the world's decreasing fossil fuels or the development of renewable energy. In this new ‘energy world order’, Europe is split between ‘fast movers’, countries like the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Denmark and UK which are at the forefront of the  climate change agenda, and ‘slow movers’, countries from the Eastern and Central Europe which are more interested in the energy security agenda.

Ms Friis thought that the political discourse should focus on energy security rather the climate change mitigation as the new common European goal, and Europe should limit its over-reliance on coal and oil and aim to become fossil fuel independent by 2050. She thought that a potential policy response at European level could be a combination of working together towards a global deal of putting a price on carbon and ‘green’ technology such as, for example, the Super Grid System (a common European energy infrastructure) which would push down prices on renewable energy and make it available across more countries and various climates.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

Welcome to the CLUES blog!

The CLUES project officially began on 1st October 2010. As you can see from our profile, we are an inter-disciplinary team from the disciplines of planning, architecture, construction studies, engineering, economics and social psychology. We are seeking to tackle the issue of the decentralisation of energy systems down to the urban level - everything from local demand management schemes, to district heating installations, to bio-mass CHP (combined heat and power). We will be reporting our research process and findings on our main project website (in process of construction). But in this blog we aim to share our experiences of undertaking interdisciplinary research and we hope this will be of wider interest to the research community. Catalina Turcu (CLUES Research Associate) and I will be off to EPSRC and ESRC sponsored events on the Sustainable Urban Environments and Rural Economy and Land Use research programmes over the next two days. Back soon with some thoughts from these events.
Yvonne Rydin, UCL