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Low Carbon Services Research

Projects supervised by: Professor Andrew Gouldson, Professor William Gale,Professor Peter Taylor, Dr Julia Steinberger, Dr Timothy Foxon, Dr Valerie Dupont and Professor Nik Kapur

Researchers: Gemma Brady, Ruth Bush, Hannah James, Erica Marshall, Morgan Tatchell-Evans

The way we live our lives has evolved rapidly over the last 150 years. As we have become more dependent on technology and developments for our everyday lifestyle, our demand has grown.

Research into low carbon services aims to address these issues through finding innovative ways to reduce demand and optimise service systems.

The DTC and Low Carbon Services Research

Research into low carbon services in the DTC comprises a broad breadth of focus areas that address energy demand, energy efficiency and energy technologies.

Energy demand in buildings stems from our need for warm, ventilated and illuminated rooms as well as food preparation appliances and the upkeep of safe hygiene levels. On-going research in this area is seeking to find new metrics for measuring energy performance will be developed.

To optimise energy efficiency, a detailed study of the data centre facilities at The University of Leeds will entail energy use monitoring along with environmental parameters to provide an overall picture of efficiency. Recommendations will be suggested to The University of Leeds regarding improvements that could be made to these metrics and alternative methods that could be used will also be discussed.

The DTC includes a lot of research into renewable electricity and heat generation. Energy supply could be one of the greatest challenges we will meet in the next half century and microgeneration and renewable heat technologies will become an important consideration to tackle this problem. These incur a lot of issues that will need to be overcome; from social inclusion to policy implementation to technology viability. Success in these areas could help to alleviate fuel poverty, reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to energy generation and provide a more secure energy future.