Smart buildings, communities and cities

To manage the transition to low carbon cities, systems and societies, we need to develop urban modelling approaches that enable us to quantify the impacts of energy efficiency measures in the building stock and how to intelligently control them to maintain energy efficiency and operate flexibly.

Recent Projects

FlexTECC: Flexible Timing of Energy Consumption in Communities

EPSRC Innovation fellowship: decentralised control of urban energy systems, to enable buildings to operate efficiently and provide demand response services to the broader energy system.

FlexTECC on the EDC website

IEA EBC Annex 82

Energy Flexible Buildings Towards Resilient Low Carbon Energy Systems.

IEA EBC Annex 82 on the EBC website

Active Building Centre (ABC)

The Active Building Centre’s vision is to transform the UK construction and energy sectors through the deployment of Active Buildings contributing to more efficient energy use and decarbonisation.

Low carbon climate-responsive Heating and Cooling of Cities (LoHCool)

LoHCool focuses on 'Delivering economic and energy-efficient heating and cooling to city areas of different population densities and climates'.

LoHCool on the UKRI website

Design4Energy

Building life-cycle evolutionary design methodology able to create energy-efficient buildings flexibly connected with the neighbourhood energy system.

Sustainable Community Energy Networks (SCENe)

Accelerating the adoption of Community Energy Systems at Nottingham’s Trent Basin housing development.

SCENe website

SECURE: SElf Conserving URban Environments

Developing a regional model of housing energy demand as part of a large EPSRC-funded consortium project.

SECURE on the UKRI website

4M: An Evidence-Based Methodology for Understanding and Shrinking the Urban Carbon Footprint

An EPSRC-funded study investigating the urban carbon footprint carried out by five universities: Loughborough University, De Montfort University, Newcastle University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds.

Contact Us

Dr Stephen Watson

Stephen's research expertise includes the analysis of monitored building energy demand and empirical modelling of energy demand.