A future city-wide energy system will need to: (i) be resilient to dips in supply; (ii) handle shortage caused by peaks in demand; (iii) exploit ‘excess’ energy from ‘predictably intermittent’ local renewable supplies; (iv) deal with future increased demand caused by new technologies – particularly electric vehicles and a shift from gas to electricity (ASHP) for heating.

The University of Bristol already reduces cost and environmental impact by using demand-shifting and renewable generation, and conducts research on more advanced approaches.

Bristol Smart Energy Consortium has identified opportunities and barriers to rolling such approach out across the city in a community-oriented, rather than top-down technocratic, way. This project will investigate the link between the technical infrastructure that Bristol Is Open (BIO) provides, current and future smart energy technology, and community engagement and acceptability. Specifically, it will explore:

• How can BIO enable ‘distributed campuses’ of communities to collaboratively manage their energy to reduce costs and improve resilience?
• What techniques, levels of autonomy, approaches to self-empowerment and feedback would be appealing, or unappealing, to communities?
• What hopes and concerns do communities have around smart energy management?
• How can technical approaches be used to support the use of non-traditional financial models to fund the capital outlay necessary?

This project is being carried out by Dr Chris Preist in the Faculty of Engineering.  Chris's expertise is in Sustainability and Computer Systems.