Home heating is a major source of green house gases, therefore reducing the carbon footprint of our heating systems is a priority in the context of the climate emergency. This will be achieved through the introduction of low carbon heating systems to our homes, controlled through 'smart' systems which are technologically complex but need much less input from us. Home heating transitions are deeply personal and significantly affect the way people use energy, triggering deeper changes to our societies, economies and cultures which affect our everyday lives in many different ways such as changing our routines, the way we divide labour between genders, the rooms we use in the home, how we relate to each other within families and the kinds of jobs we do. This will not be the first major change to home heating that many of us have experienced. Many will remember the shift from burning coal or wood to central or district heating but efforts to learn lessons from those transitions to ensure that future heating transitions can be fairer and smoother have been very limited. Within this project, we aim to understand how major changes to home heating and heating technology over the last 70 years have been designed, managed and experienced, the many ways they have impacted our lives and what lessons we might learn for the current transition to low carbon systems. We do this through oral history interviews where members of the public in case study locations around the UK, Sweden, Finland and Romania tell us in detail about their memories of keeping warm at home throughout their lives and the ways their lives have been affected by changes to home heating systems and routines. Artists appointed in each country will build exhibitions to show how heating has affected our lives in different ways over time and to start public conversations about a fair and progressive low carbon future for heating. We will work with communities leading, resisting and excluded from heating transitions to assemble a lasting archive of multi-media accounts of lived experiences of heating transitions, illustrating how they impact unevenly yet deeply on our everyday lives. These lived experiences will help put policy makers designing low carbon heating transitions in touch with their consequences for our everyday lives, helping to create a fairer future for home heating where the negative impacts of technological and digital innovation are understood and addressed.

The vision for the EDI+ network is to acknowledge and address key challenges and equip a cohort of researchers and their organisations to make lasting changes towards a diverse, equitable, inclusive and accessible research community. This will have impact beyond the academy and set a precedent, offering the means to tailor EDI action among the diverse organisations participating in energy research. It garners the best of scientific and social science evidence and critical approaches from the humanities to put EDI challenges in appropriate perspectives and make them available for action. It is action-oriented and based on an effective Theory of Change Model that considers: -> the desired outcomes (aims) for the network (An energy research community that is equal, inclusive and diverse) -> the evidence-informed assumptions for achieving the outcomes (such as findings from the Inclusion Matters programme) -> the activities that, based on the assumptions, should be implemented to achieve the aims (prioritising time, training and support for action) Evidence suggests that key barriers to effective change in EDI can be condensed to be: - Lack of Time to develop deep, evidence-based understanding of local issues - Lack of Access to the power structures required to enact change - Lack of resource and evidence-based solutions to issues that are found - Isolation from peers with experience of EDI driven change In response, we propose a fellowship programme, which recruits EDI champions from diverse energy research institutions; trains them in EDI issues; research methods for analysing organisational contexts, how to make organisational changes, and how to implement and evaluate plans of action; and supports them to publish their results. All fellows will have the support of a named senior executive of their organisation, all of whom will engage in cross-institutional reciprocal mentoring to embed learning and change in the institutional context. We name these 'fellowships' (despite the possible connotations of the term 'fellow') so that they will have prestige on the participants' cv's, emphasise the research-basis of the actions, and lend weight to their change-making activities under the network. The 'fellows' will form a mutually supportive network that should endure beyond the life of the funding scheme. EPSRC funded fellows will be complemented by industry- and government- funded fellows to expand the network beyond the funded call, and with the establishment of an alumni network, will offer the potential for the network to endure beyond the funding period. Selected training events will be open to the wider energy research community, who will also have access to a toolkit on EDI actions in context and all other network publications. Additional impact activities will include workshops and presentations to coincide with existing conference and research events, to maximise the reach of the network. Findings will be shared and promoted through a 'network of networks' approach across the energy research community nationally, and internationally.

Peak electricity demand is becoming an increasingly significant problem for UK electricity networks as it causes imbalances between demand and supply with negative impacts on system costs and the environment. The residential sector is responsible for about one third of overall electricity demand and up to 40% of peak demand. During peak demand, electricity prices in wholesale markets could fluctuate from less than £0.03/kWh to as much as £0.29/kWh. Time of Use tariffs offer significant potential benefits to the system by enabling responsive electricity demand and reducing peaks. For example, this could reduce the need for new generation and network capacity. However, the impact of more cost-reflective pricing will vary between consumers. In particular, those who consume electricity at more expensive peak periods, and who are unable to change their consumption patterns, could end up paying significantly more. Understanding the distributional effects of Time of Use tariffs becomes vital to ensuring affordability of energy bills, whilst making demand more flexible. Whilst there is research on fuel poverty in relation to aggregate level of consumption of electricity, little is known about the effects of dynamic tariffs on different socio-demographic groups. DEePRED will fill this gap. The overall aim of DEePRED is to analyse the distributional effects of Time of Use tariffs with a view to identify clusters of users which might significantly benefit or be disadvantaged through the provision of demand flexibility. The project will analyse 10-minute resolution time use activity data from the UK Office for National Statistics Time Use Survey with a view to derive information about times of the day in which different groups of people occupy households and carry out energy-related activities. The time use data will be combined with parameter data on temperatures, sunlight, number and typical consumption of household appliances and dwelling types to derive load profiles. This will take place thanks to the implementation of activity schemes. Load profiles data will then be used to calculate how consumer bills may change for different groups of consumers on stylised Time of Use tariffs.

The Climate Change Act 2008 requires a 34% cut in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and at least an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050. Residential and commercial buildings account for 25% and 18% of the UK's total CO2 emissions respectively and therefore have a significant role to play in a national decarbonisation strategy. As the UK has some of the oldest and least efficient buildings in Europe, there is substantial scope for improving the efficiency of energy end-use within UK buildings. However efforts to improve building energy efficiency, specifically the thermal efficiency of the building fabric, have to date focused primarily on the analysis and assessment of single properties. The slow uptake of insulation measures through the Green Deal and Energy Companies Obligation testifies to the difficulty of achieving these changes on a house-by-house basis. If the UK is to achieve its energy and climate policy targets, then a more ambitious whole-city approach to building energy improvements is needed. Technical innovations in remote sensing and infrared thermography mean that it is now possible to conduct building efficiency surveys at a mass scale. The challenge is how such data can be improved (for example moving from 2D plan imagery to 3D models of the built environment) and combined with systems analysis tools to inform effective retrofit strategies. The Urban Scale Building Energy Network will investigate this research challenge by bringing together five academic co-investigators with disciplinary expertise from across the building retrofit value chain from remote autonomous sensing to building physics, energy systems design, consumer behaviour and policy. Working with two experienced mentors from the fields of energy systems and building energy services, the co-investigators will undertake a series of activities in collaboration with project partners from industry and government to better understand the research challenge and develop roadmaps for future research. The activities include: - Two workshops and a series of bilateral meetings for the academic team to learn about each other's expertise and how it can be coordinated and brought to bear on the research challenge. The project mentors will play a crucial role here, helping the co-investigators to create personal development plans that will build both technical and non-technical skills for successful careers. - A workshop with over 20 representatives from government and industry to discuss previous experience and the perceived obstacles to more ambitious building energy retrofits. - An active online communications strategy incorporating a project website, YouTube videos, and a Twitter hashtag campaign in order to engage the general public and understand how households and commercial building occupants understand the challenge of transforming the UK's building stock. - A feasibility study to summarize the state of the art in new sensing technologies and analysis techniques for building thermal energy performance assessment and to identify major outstanding challenges for future research proposals. The proposed network will therefore facilitate collaboration between academics, industry, government and the general public to address a question of great national importance. The project outputs will help to create a wider understanding of the specific challenges facing the UK's aspirations for the transformation of its building stock as well as highlighting potentially fruitful avenues for research. The network therefore aspires to build upon this twelve-month programme of work and develop significant long-term research collaborations with benefits for academic knowledge, society and the wider economy.

The UK is facing an energy crisis on three fronts: climate change, energy security, and affordability. This challenge requires a fundamental change in our society, to enable a deep energy demand reduction and wide use of low-carbon technologies, supported by policy, businesses and the public alike. Energy demand reduction is in fact fundamental so that we can improve energy security, reduce household energy bills and address climate change. Research has shown that reducing energy use could help meet half of the required emissions reductions we need by 2050 to become a Net Zero society. While this poses a challenge, it also provides an opportunity for the UK to become a global leader in energy demand reduction, and associated research. The Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC) develops the next phase of energy demand research in the UK, building on previous research and working closely with academic and non-academic partners. Our work will inform and inspire energy demand reductions that support an affordable, comfortable and secure Net Zero society. Our research programme cuts across different sciences (e.g. engineering and social) and sectors (e.g. buildings, transport and industry). We study which energy demand solutions can be delivered in a flexible and equitable manner and at which locations, taking into consideration issues such as local housing stock and transport links, skills base and governance models. We aim to deliver impactful research on energy demand that produces actionable solutions for industry, policy makers, practitioners and charities.