Community Energy Literature Review

Retrofit was the subject of a post on 12 th October, in which the following open access paper was mentioned: A response-factor based method for the rapid in situ determination of a wall’s thermal resistance in existing buildings Arash Rasooli et al., 2016, Energy and Buildings. In view of the possible relevance of the content to practical measurements on buildings considered for retrofit, a list of papers which cite Rasooli et al. are given below, together with brief extracts. Those which are available on open access are noted. Applying an artificial neural network to assess thermal transmittance in walls by means of the thermometric method  Bienvenido-Huertas, D., Moyano, J., Rodríguez-Jiménez, C.E., Marín, D. 2019 Applied Energy Most of the existing building stock has a deficient energy behaviour. The thermal transmittance of façades is among those aspects which most affect this situation. In this paper, the calculation procedure with correction for stor...

Comparing CE in the UK, Germany and the USA A paper in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 94 (2018) compares aspects of Community Energy (CE) in three countries. The author, Vasco Brummer, seeks to sum up the current state of knowledge on the subject, and to pursue the themes of societal benefits from, and barriers to community energy in each country. The paper “ Community energy – benefits and barriers: A comparative literature review of Community Energy in the UK, Germany and the USA, the benefits it provides for society and the barriers it faces ” is not currently available on open access. The countries were selected partly to reflect differences in their policies towards supporting and regulating CE, and the effects on its development. Germany was an early adopter of a Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme supporting Renewable Energy (RE), and this helped to build a strong CE movement. In the UK a more market-driven approach was taken, with a renewable portfolio standard ...

Retrofit 2050: upgrading UK housing stock A joint publication by the IET and Nottingham Trent University entitled Scaling up Retrofit 2050 claims that “a nationwide programme to upgrade the existing housing stock is the only way for the UK to achieve its carbon saving goals.” It points out that domestic energy consumption “accounts for about 30% of the UK’s total energy budget, and 20% of UK greenhouse gas emissions” and claims that since “80% of the homes we will be living in by 2050 have already been built, a nationwide programme of deep retrofits and refurbishment of the existing stock is the only way to deliver the required carbon savings.” The paper goes on to describe barriers to progress, and makes recommendations for action, focussing on social housing. It is available at: https://www.theiet.org/sectors/built-environment/topics/heat/articles/retrofit.cfm The following papers focus on a single aspect of retrofitting, namely the measurement of U-values in existing struct...

A September forum on ‘Electric vehicles and electricity system’ included a presentation by Nick Brooks, head of energy, OLEV, entitled “Road to Zero Strategy and Investment in Charging Infrastructure”, followed by a panel discussion. (OLEV is the Office for Low Emission Vehicles, part of the UK Departments for Transport and for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-for-low-emission-vehicles ) A presentation by Nicks Brooks, “Driving the rEVolution” is available online from Regen, the forum organiser, at: http://www.regen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/180918-REGEN-Event-Nick.pdf This concentrates on UK government policy and targets and is in the form of illustrated bullet points, providing headings for discussion. A paper from Regen entitled “Harnessing the Electric Vehicle Revolution”, is wider ranging, and provides a background to the forum. It views an electric transport system as an inevitable response to cli...