End-use demand in commercial office buildings: case-study and modelling recommendations

While considerable progress has been made on developing high-resolution stochastic models of electricity demand for the domestic sector, non-domestic models remain relatively undeveloped. This paper provides general recommendations about how such models might be structured for commercial offices, based on detailed analysis of high-resolution end-use demand data for a single multi-tenanted office building. The results indicate that modelling of commercial office buildings could be viewed as analogous to modelling a group of dwellings with partial residency (to represent individual office units within the building), with communal heating and communal spaces, a limited number of work related appliances, and occupant activities restricted to those related to work

Can practice make perfect (models)? Incorporating social practice theory into quantitative energy demand models

Demand response could be increasingly valuable in coping with the intermittency of a future renewables-dominated electricity grid. There is a growing body of work being done specifically on understanding demand response from a people and practices point of view. This paper will start by introducing some of the recent research in this area and will present social practice theory (SPT) as a useful way of looking at the flexibility and timing of energy-use practices. However, for the insights gained from SPT to have value for the electricity supply industry it is important to be able to represent this flexibility in quantitative energy demand models. This requires an interdisciplinary conversation that allows SPT and modelling concepts to be mapped together. This paper presents an initial step in trying to achieve this. Drawing on empirical data from a recent SPT study into flexible energy-use practices, it will experiment with modelling flexible demand in such a way as to take account of the complexity of practices; not just their ‘stuff’ but also some of the images and skills involved in their competent performance. There are several reasons this is a useful enterprise. It encourages interdisciplinary insights which are valuable both to social practice theory and to energy demand modelling, it highlights new ways of intervening in flexible demand and it establishes a research agenda for social practice theorists and modellers which will eventually result in a set of requirements that can be used to build an energy demand model based on practice theory. This area of research is in its early stages and so the conceptual mapping is necessarily speculative but, hopefully, also stimulating

An evaluation of waste management for energy recovery for the Kingdom of Bahrain

An evaluation of waste management for energy recovery for the Kingdom of Bahrai

High-temporal-resolution analysis of UK power system used to determine the optimal amount and mix of energy storage technologies [2015 Powerpoint]

High-temporal-resolution analysis of UK power system used to determine the optimal amount and mix of energy storage technologies [2015 Powerpoint