Industrial strategy and the UK regions: Sectorally narrow and spatially blind

The UK government's new Industrial Strategy could have a significant impact on the country's regions and localities. However, this has received little attention to date. The analysis presented here examines the existing location of the sectors targeted by the first phase of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and the location of the R&D laboratories likely to be first in line for funding. In focusing on an extremely narrow range of sectors, the Fund is likely to have limited impact on the UK's persistent regional inequalities. The activities eligible for support account for relatively little of manufacturing or the rest of the economy and the basis of this targeting and its potential distributional consequences are spatially blind. As such, it runs the risk of widening regional divides in prosperity

Home as a Site of State-Corporate Violence: Grenfell Tower, Aetiologies and Aftermaths

Focusing on the aftermaths and consequences of the Grenfell Tower fire, this article reveals the factors which combined to produce a fire that could have such devastating effects. Further, it delineates the discrete ways in which distinct types of harms – physical, emotional and psychological, cultural and relational, and financial and economic – continue to be produced by a combination of State and corporate acts and omissions. Some of these harms are readily apparent, others are opaque and obscured. It concludes by showing how failures to mitigate these factors constitute one manifestation of the more general phenomenon of ‘social murder’

Assessment and optimisation of energy consumption in building communities using an innovative co-simulation tool

Energy efficiency in building sector is attracting an increasing interest in the scientific community, due to its strong impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. In this context, the REMOURBAN H2020 project has carried out a pilot deep refurbishing work on a small cluster of 10 homes, implementing energy saving measures and a hybrid energy-supply system to satisfy the heating and domestic hot water demand. The system aims to achieve near-zero-energy homes level of performance at reasonable cost by offsetting the energy consumption with local energy microgeneration. It is designed as a local low temperature district heating system and includes ground source heat pumps, photovoltaic panels, electric and thermal energy storage devices. The management of the complex hybrid system requires a suitable control strategy to optimise the energy consumption and consequently running cost. With this purpose a co-simulation tool has been developed, coupling a model of the energy system built using Dymola-Modelica and the EnergyPlus model of the buildings. This allows to develop different control strategies aiming to reduce the energy consumption from the grid, maximize the self-consumption of photovoltaic energy and ultimately move away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy resources