Emergence of District-Heating Networks; Barriers and Enablers in the Development Process

Infrastructure provision business models that promise resource efficiencies and additional benefits, such as job creation, community cohesion and crime reduction exist at sub-national scales. These local business models, however, exist only as isolated cases of good practice and their expansion and wider adoption has been limited in the context of many centralised systems that are currently the norm. In this contribution, we present a conceptual agent based model for analysing the potential for different actors to implement local infrastructure provision business models. The model is based on agents’ ability to overcome barriers that occur throughout the development (i.e. feasibility, business case, procurement, and construction), and operation and maintenance of alternative business models. This presents a novel approach insofar as previous models have concentrated on the acceptance of alternative value provision models rather than the emergence of underlying business models. We implement the model for the case study of district heating networks in the UK, which have the potential to significantly contribute to carbon emission reductions, but remain under-developed compared with other European countries

Simulation support for internet-based energy services

The rapidly developing Internet broadband network offers new opportunities for deploying a range of energy, environment and health-related services for people in their homes and workplaces. Several of these services can be enabled or enhanced through the application of building simulation. This paper describes the infrastructure for e-services under test within a European research project and shows the potential for simulation support for these services

Performance prediction tools for low impact building design

IT systems are emerging that may be used to support decisions relating to the design of a built enviroment that has low impact in terms of energy use and environmental emissions. This paper summarises this prospect in relation to four complementary application areas: digital cities, rational planning, virtual design and Internet energy services

Load Balancing with Energy Storage Systems Based on Co-Simulation of Multiple Smart Buildings and Distribution Networks

In this paper, we present a co-simulation framework that combines two main simulation tools, one that provides detailed multiple building energy simulation ability with Energy-Plus being the core engine, and the other one that is a distribution level simulator, Matpower. Such a framework can be used to develop and study district level optimization techniques that exploit the interaction between a smart electric grid and buildings as well as the interaction between buildings themselves to achieve energy and cost savings and better energy management beyond what one can achieve through techniques applied at the building level only. We propose a heuristic algorithm to do load balancing in distribution networks affected by service restoration activities. Balancing is achieved through the use of utility directed usage of battery energy storage systems (BESS). This is achieved through demand response (DR) type signals that the utility communicates to individual buildings. We report simulation results on two test cases constructed with a 9-bus distribution network and a 57-bus distribution network, respectively. We apply the proposed balancing heuristic and show how energy storage systems can be used for temporary relief of impacted networks

Experiments in climate governance – lessons from a systematic review of case studies in transition research

Experimentation has been proposed as one of the ways in which public policy can drive sustainability transitions, notably by creating or delimiting space for experimenting with innovative solutions to sustainability challenges. In this paper we report on a systematic review of articles published between 2009 and 2015 that have addressed experiments aiming either at understanding decarbonisation transitions or enhancing climate resilience. Using the case survey method, we find few empirical descriptions of real-world experiments in climate and energy contexts in the scholarly literature, being observed in only 25 articles containing 29 experiments. We discuss the objectives, outputs and outcomes of these experiments noting that explicit experimenting with climate policies could be identified only in 12 cases. Based on the results we suggest a definition of climate policy experiments and a typology of experiments for sustainability transitions that can be used to better understand the role of and learn more effectively from experiments in sustainability transitions

Enabling Machine Understandable Exchange of Energy Consumption Information in Intelligent Domotic Environments

In the 21st century, all the major countries around the world are coming together to reduce the impact of energy generation and consumption on the global environment. Energy conservation and its efficient usage has become a top agenda on the desks of many governments. In the last decade, the drive to make homes automated and to deliver a better assisted living picked pace and the research into home automation systems accelerated, usually based on a centralized residential gateway. However most devised solutions fail to provide users with information about power consumption of different house appliances. The ability to collect power consumption information can lead us to have a more energy efficient society. The goal addressed in this paper is to enable residential gateways to provide the energy consumption information, in a machine understandable format, to support third party applications and services. To reach this goal, we propose a Semantic Energy Information Publishing Framework. The proposed framework publishes, for different appliances in the house, their power consumption information and other properties, in a machine understandable format. Appliance properties are exposed according to the existing semantic modeling supported by residential gateways, while instantaneous power consumption is modeled through a new modular Energy Profile ontolog

Fostering energy efficiency dynamics through ex-ante strategic niche management: the UK perspective

The United Kingdom building sector has been challenged to retrofit a huge stock of existing buildings in order to increase its adaptive capacity for climate change impacts. Addressing such challenges will require systematic structural changes in both, socio-technical and socio-political infrastructure. A numbers of studies have suggested the approach of strategic niche management of transition for sustainable technological regimes. Accordingly, any such transition would follow processes: early stages of niche formation; creation of policy mechanism required to harness the niches; niche expansion into incumbent regime; and the regime transition into more sustainable technological regime. Following this, the UK Government has introduced a raft of initiatives; one of which is “Green Deal” to enable buildings to become energy efficient through retrofit technologies, ultimately contributing towards the national goal of achieving 80% reduction in carbon emission by 2050. This paper serves three purposes. First, the paper introduces multi-level socio-technical system for construction/retrofitting in building industry. Second, the ex-ante strategic niche management approach has been used to analyse the dynamic of “Green Deal” initiative. Thereby the paper would critically assess technological, organisational and institutional reforms undertaken for the initiative in the processes for sustainable socio-technical transition. Third, the paper would contribute towards strategic niche management literature which lacks in practical examples of using it as an ex-ante tool for niche building and regime transition