From the Planning Research Conference

Energy was not a big theme at the Planning Research Conference recently held at University of Birmingham, but there were a couple of papers of interest. The EPSRC CALEBRE project was highlighted. This looks at retroffiting 'hard to treat' housing stock and one conclusion was strongly emphasised: the lack of skills in the UK SME sector. Loss of insulation at service entry points was often exacerbated by retrofitting and poor installation of energy saving equipment sometimes led to higher energy consumption. Their research showed that consumers are worried about poor workmanship and on this basis they are right! One way forward is for local authorities or NGOs to work on a neighbourhood or street basis and monitor work standards as part of their procurement role.
Another interesting paper came from Germany and looked at cooperatives. Apparently two new energy cooperatives were opening every month in Germany last year. These organisations have climate protection written into their founding charters and can be used for a variety of urban development projects. One advantage is that such cooperatives can access finance, both public and private. An example can be found at www.moeckernkiez.de.

Devolution to cities. Could this be the answer to urban energy decentralisation?

Today, it has been announced that England's biggest cities will be able to bid for powers from central government to boost economic growth, after a series of amendmends to the Localism Bill received cross-party support in the House of Lords. This would pave the way for cities to have greater control over policy areas such as economic growth, housing and planning and regeneration. Cities would also be free to pool resources across functioning economic areas. It seems that cities will be able to bid for freedom to set their own distinctive policies and when they will come up with innovative proposals for doing things differently, the central government will devolve the powers cities need to implement them. Could this be the answer to a more successful and extensive decentralisation of urban energy systems? And how about smaller-scale cities and towns?

Catalina Turcu, UCL
14 September 2011

ARUP Scenarios: Renewables 'could provide 35% of energy capacity by 2020'

A new report by Arup for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) suggests there is huge potential to expand the use of renewable energy technology across the country.

The research looks at three scenarios for the future operation of renewables – low, medium and high – based on the maximum capacity that could be built per year between now and 2030.

The study looks at a range of technologies including wind, solar, hydro, biomass, geothermal and energy from waste, but does not highlight the benefits of one particular renewable technology.

Arup said that it will be up to government, industry and the public to decide how to overcome the barriers to greater use including planning issues and the costs of connection to the grid.

The study provides a detailed picture of generation costs and deployment potential for a wide range of technologies.

Catalina Turcu, UCL
17 June 2011

2011 NESS Part 1 – The 10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference, Stockholm

Climate change and the story of two planets

Two planets meet in outer space. One is a beautiful blue marble planet, while the other is a very sad planet, in a poor shape.  The beautiful blue planet asks the other:

-          What ‘on Earth’ has happened to you?

The other says wearily:

-          I’ve got Homo Sapiens!

The beautiful blue marble planet answers back:

-          Don’t worry it will pass quickly!

by Johan Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Stockholm Environment Institute

Catalina Turcu, UCL

17 June 2011

Carbon Capture and Storage event at UCL

You might be interested in the following:

IEEP in collaboration with the Energy Research Centre in the
Netherlands, Cambridge University, the Tyndall Centre, the Fraunhofer
Institute, and CIEMAT are organizing a workshop investigating the public
perception of carbon capture and storage. The conference will be held at the University College of London on June 23rd . For more information, please see:
www.communicationnearco2.eu
or contact Richard Foulsham on:
t. +44 (0)207 679 1511
e. r.foulsham@ucl.ac.uk

Yvonne Rydin

Bavarian Renewables!

Just back from one week holiday to Bavaria, in Germany! I was really impressed by the amount of solar panels (both PV and thermal) pepper-potted in the Bavarian landscape - they were everywhere and sometimes covering HUGE areas!!! - on houses, sheds or temporary roofs, everywhere! Almost every house in certain towns had solar panels on them - and in considerable quantities - and they all FED IN! We also came across two or three really big solar farms (near Wurzburg and Nurnberg from what I remember), big plastic containers for biofuels (usually adjacent to bigger farms) and many wind turbines. However, I couldn't notice the same 'activity' in bigger towns or cities. It seemed to me that the 'renewables deployment' was considerably more advanced in rural and semi-urban areas than in urban areas. Why?

The farmer we stayed with explained that the government has very strong financial incentives in place for solar energy generation: the unit of generated solar electricity was almost double the price of traditional energy. In addition, farmers were offered a 20-year deal during which the 'double' price was fixed and on average the first 10 years paid for the investment while the next 10 made a healthy profit for the farmer. He thought (and this is interesting for the CLUES project) that it is more difficult to make it profitable or apply the same scale of deployment to urban areas where roofs were smaller and more compact, or it might prove difficult to agree a deal in multi-occupancy buildings (where more than one household lived under the same roof) where homeowners had to agree a common ground. He also told us that the wind turbines were mainly the enterprise of energy companies and were somehow unpopular with the general public because of altering the landscape (heard it before!) and that many farms were generating biofuel!

Catalina Turcu, UCL
6 June 2011

Researcher Wanted in Energy Case Study Development

A Researcher is required to work on the CLUES: CHALLENGING LOCK-IN THROUGH URBAN ENERGY SYSTEMS project at Loughborough University.

The post involves investigating the potential for local urban energy schemes to contribute to the UK’s long term carbon reduction targets to 2050 and the development of innovative urban energy case studies incorporating learning from Europe and further afield.

Experience in case study development and handling large and complex qualitative and quantitative datasets and paper writing is essential. Experience of organising and carrying out workshops, state of the art reviews and interviewing is desirable. You will have a good first degree in engineering, social sciences, business studies, geography or environment (other disciplines may also be acceptable).

Further information at:

http://jobs.lboro.ac.uk/index.php?page=Details&id=1422

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ACQ231/research-associate-in-energy-case-study-development/

Closing Date for applications: Thursday 09 June 2011

For an informal discussion please contact Dr Chris Goodier at C.I.Goodier@lboro.ac.uk, +44(0)1509 222623, Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU.

Energy futures and the Renewable Energy Review (CCC)

Last monday (9th of May), the Climate Change Comittee (CCC) presented the Renewable Energy Review (see slides here ) which has been welcomed by the ETI and commented by professional press (here and there) or NGOs.

The review was commissioned by the Government, to advise on the role of renewable energy in UK energy consumption after 2020. Indeed, under the NREAP, (National Renewable Energy Action Plan to fulfil the EU Directive) renewable electricity generation will grow from 32TWh in 2010 to 117TWh in 2020, which would represent 31% of electricity demand.

The latest review of the CCC aims to look at role for renewables beyond 2020 in meeting the 2050 target to reduce carbon emissions by 80% on 1990 levels, available resource, and the speed of deployment. Therefore, this review builds on the Fourth carbon budget work looking to 2030 and beyond (to be released by the CCC in june 2011). Four specific papers have been commissioned on costs, discount rates used for low carbon technologies renewable heat and technical constraints.

Based on new technical and economic analysis, this Committee’s latest report recommended that renewables should make up 30-45% of the country’s energy by 2030, with wind and marine power leading the way. A specific chapter also deals with renewable heat.

In CLUES, we are quantifying the four scenarios that were developed in the Foresight Sustainable Energy Management and the Built Environment project (link to a presentation of SEMBE on Youtube, full archives from BIS ), and developing a shared understanding of how the energy system could evolve between now and 2050 at different scales - urban, regional and national.
This new review bringing up-to-date data and potentials and assessing key enabling factors is therefore of great interest and worth discussing the hypothesis and numbers.

Energy Futures: An event about the Research Councils UK Energy Programme

On May, the 11^th I went to an event about the RCUK Energy Programme at the House of Commons. The event was organised by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and RCUK and hosted an interactive exhibition of the latest developments in UK energy research. The RCUK Energy Programme ‘Energy for a Low Carbon Future’ is currently investing over £530 million in energy research targeting a wide range of topics from the latest nuclear, maritime and wind technologies to carbon capture and storage (CCS), fuel cells, domestic retrofitting and low carbon transport.

Two highlights from this event are of interest to the CLUES Project.

First, I had an interesting discussion with Professor Jon Gibbins of University of Edinburgh about the challenge of CCS in the context of decentralised energy systems. He suggested that that there is potential for decarbonising buildings by indirect use of gas and biomass. That’s to say that instead of current decarbonisation efforts within the built environment, directed at energy efficiency and decentralised initiatives such as renewables and small-scale combined heat and power plants fuelled by natural gas or biomass, the same result could be obtained by the same fuels used in centralised plants to generate electricity that can then power heat pumps. In turn, a greater emphasis on the use of heat pumps would facilitate the use of non-fossil electricity and the future application of carbon capture and storage to reduce emissions from any centralised fossil fuel use. He also highlighted the compatibility between centralised hydrogen production with carbon capture and storage and CHP (combined heat and power) and the need for further research and understanding of combined centralised/decentralised approaches. Always interesting to look at energy decentralisation with a centralisation twist!

Second, I was interested in Professor Adisa Azapagic’s (of Manchester University) ‘sustainable nuclear energy’ decision support tool: SPRING. The tool considers a range of technological, economic, social and policy aspects employed when deploying nuclear energy. The CLUES Project also aims to deliver a tool for local authorities to support decision making on decentralised energy and so, the methodological aspects of SPRING could be relevant here. Watch out this space!

Catalina Turcu, UCL

12 May 2011

Planning and Infrastructure in England

At the heart of the CLUES project are the numerous urban initatives occuring that are creating a new urban energy system. While some of these are focussed on demand management, many do involve new urban infrastructure. In the light of this, a conference run at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL last Friday on Infrastructure Development and Planning was very interesting. This highlighted the new regime that has emerged over the last decade and that is being reinforced by the current Coalition Government. Under this approach, planning is centrally about initiating new infrastructure patterns to guide and service new urban development. It also has to mesh with a local government focus on identifying current plans for infrastructure investment from the public and private sectors and matching this against future needs, with a concrete plan (the Infrastructure Delivery Plan) to fill the resulting gap. This regime works most easily where large chunks of infrastructure (a new public transport line) or aggregate infrastructure investment plans (from the health sector) can be identified. How tihs will work when faced with numerous, decentralised initiatives in energy generation and distribution is a moot point. This is an issue we will be looking out for when we conduct our local case studies.

Yvonne Rydin