low-carbon-buildings | Engineering | University of Southampton

Decarbonising the built environment is key to delivering on the UK’s net zero carbon ambitions. Our work is predominantly at the user:technology interface to assess interventions in both the housing and commercial sectors through case studies.

Explore this case study

The challenge

Infrastructure lock-in, in the form of gas heating, is a major challenge that needs to be addressed. The current pathway in the UK is widely seen to be one of electric heating, especially in the form of heat pumps. This raises the following questions: How can building envelopes be upgraded economically to enable low carbon heating systems to be used at scale? How can the electricity network be supported / operated to enable this fundamental change to heating systems? How will people live with these technologies and what is the impact of user behaviour on system performance?

What we do

We undertake large scale, longitudinal field trials in the built environment. Our work is people-focussed understanding how technologies work in the real world. Our work is based on determining effects with statistical rigour in the fields of thermal comfort, energy behaviour, microgeneration technologies and building retrofit.

Our impact

Our staff have led or contributed to several national studies such as the micro-wind, solar thermal and heat pump trials for the Energy Saving Trust. We contribute to CIBSE guidance such as TM guides (TM53) and work with the IEA Energy in Buildings and Communities programme (Annex 66, 69 and 79). We led the statistically rigorous SAVE study of 4,000 homes over five years to apply household energy efficiency measures to support electricity networks. We are currently working to assess approaches to support the large scale uptake of heat pumps within housing.

The facilities we used and partners we work with

We work with numerous partners through longitudinal case study interventions including city and county councils, technology developers and energy suppliers. Find out more at: https://energy.soton.ac.uk/eccd-engagement/

Key Publications and media

Guidance for the design, reporting and action for energy demand reduction and behaviour change programme, see Ensuring statistics have power: Guidance for designing, reporting and acting on electricity demand reduction and behaviour change programs (2020), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629619303780?via%3Dihub

An assessment of the understanding of heating controls on homes in social housing. This work assess the implications of communal heating charges to energy use behaviour of households. See, Heating and controls use resulting from shared-cost charges in communal network social housing (2020), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143624420911170

In an office environment there is a driver to open the window (too hot or stuffy) but the driver to close the window at the end of the day is weak. Office users do not directly pay the heating bill and this can result in wasteful behaviour. This paper reports on a camera based approach to assessing window opening in naturally ventilated offices and the contextual messaging provided to office users to change their behaviour. See, The effect of behavioural interventions on energy conservation in naturally ventilated offices (2018), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988318302536

Big data modelling is a key approach going forward to optimise energy systems. See, Energy Network Modelling Approaches for Multi-Scale Building Performance Optimization (2018), https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8494369

This work shows that the occupanacy profiles that are currently used to model domestic energy usage are too limited, representing only 19% of households. See, Developing English Domestic Occupancy Profiles (2017), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09613218.2017.1399719

See https://energy.soton.ac.uk/heating-and-energy-performance/