̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - David Reiner

Farm to factories

plc32 — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:51:02 +0000

Cambridge Zero collaborates with Cambridge Global Food Security Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC) and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Decarbonisation Network for two research events in March 2024 that look at industry decarbonisation and food security.

Study finds that social justice and health issues impact electric vehicle uptake

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 15:49:08 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers found that effective communication of social and health benefits of EV ownership can be a motivating factor for influencing higher EV uptake.

̽��ֱ��study, published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, analysed Facebook postings in the United States related to EVs, using machine learning based on a PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental) framework that examines the intersection of various words and phrases.

“Social media offers a treasure trove of information to better understand how the public views the energy transition from carbon-emitting internal combustion engine to EVs,” said study co-author David Reiner from Cambridge Judge Business School.

Reiner and his collaborators used machine learning and social network analysis to identify via Facebook posts what aspects people valued in electric vehicles, and found that social justice, clean air, better health and a shift toward EVs becoming a service industry emerged as key themes.

̽��ֱ��social justice theme was quite pervasive in the researchers’ findings. One important discourse that shaped EVs’ social justice and welfare dimensions was centred around the idea that ‘We all can benefit from more electric vehicles’, as this links to environmental benefits like cleaner air, less pollution, climate change mitigation, and better health for all. There was also broad agreement on the need for state support to make EVs more affordable.

“While governments around the world have launched aggressive targets for EVs, increasingly through regulatory measures rather than direct subsidies, there has been little academic research into the drivers of EV adoption,” said Reiner. “This new study helps fill that knowledge gap, and can be a useful tool for energy policymaking in this vital area.”

Breaking down the PESTLE framework, the study found that Facebook posts relating to Political aspects were most related to EV tax and subsidies; posts on the Economy focused on consumer fees and EV market expansion; the Social dimension centred on job creation, investment and clean air; Technology posts centred around charging and batteries; while Legal and Environmental posts looked mostly at climate change and EV-related sustainability discussion.

̽��ֱ��36,000 Facebook public posts on EVs that were analysed, all posted in 2020, generated a text corpus of 600,000 words or terms that formed the data for the study’s topic modeling.

As car manufacturers consider the potential for EVs as a subscription-based service, the study also underlines the importance of understanding how EVs are now being adopted at a community level as this will influence the future design of subscription-based and shared ownership schemes.

EV sales exceeded 2.1 million globally in 2019, with 90% of sales in China, Europe and the U.S., the study observes, with sales of all-electric light-duty vehicles in the U.S. growing from zero in 2010 to 242,000 in 2019.

Reference:
Ramit Debnath et al. ‘Political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental dimensions of electric vehicle adoption in the United States: A social-media interaction analysis.’ Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.111707

Adapted from a story on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

A new study led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and based on public attitudes expressed in 36,000 Facebook posts, has found that consumer uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) can be boosted by promoting the social justice and health aspects of the technology.

Chuttersnap via Unsplash

Electric car

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

COP26: Cambridge experts on their hopes for the high-stakes summit

sc604 — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 07:58:53 +0000

What will it take to make the high-stakes United Nations climate summit a success? We spoke with some of our researchers and asked them what they want to see at COP26, what some of the biggest challenges are in getting to zero carbon, and what gives them hope.

Cambridge Zero

sc604 — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 09:29:39 +0000

If we are to avert a climate disaster, we must sharply reduce our emissions, starting today. Cambridge Zero, the ̽��ֱ��'s ambitious new climate initiative, will generate ideas and innovations to help shape a sustainable future - and equip future generations of leaders with the skills to navigate the global challenges of the coming decades.

Global learning is needed to save carbon capture and storage from being abandoned

sc604 — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 13:45:00 +0000

Carbon capture and storage, which is considered by many experts as the only realistic way to dramatically reduce carbon emissions in an affordable way, has fallen out of favour with private and public sector funders. Corporations and governments worldwide, including most recently the UK, are abandoning the same technology they championed just a few years ago.

In a commentary published today (11 January) in the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Energy, a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researcher argues that now is not the time for governments to drop carbon capture and storage (CCS). Like many new technologies, it is only possible to learn what works and what doesn’t by building and testing demonstration projects at scale, and that by giving up on CCS instead of working together to develop a global ‘portfolio’ of projects, countries are turning their backs on a key part of a low-carbon future.

CCS works by separating the carbon dioxide emitted by coal and gas power plants, transporting it and then storing it underground so that the CO₂ cannot escape into the atmosphere. Critically, CCS can also be used in industrial processes, such as chemical, steel or cement plants, and is often the only feasible way of reducing emissions at these facilities. While renewable forms of energy, such as solar or wind, are important to reducing emissions, until there are dramatic advances in battery technology, CCS will be essential to deliver flexible power and to build green industrial clusters.

“If we’re serious about meeting aggressive national or global emissions targets, the only way to do it affordably is with CCS,” said Dr David Reiner of Cambridge Judge Business School, the paper’s author. “But since 2008, we’ve seen a decline in interest in CCS, which has essentially been in lock step with our declining interest in doing anything serious about climate change.”

Just days before last year’s UN climate summit in Paris, the UK government cancelled a four-year, £1 billion competition to support large-scale CCS demonstration projects. And since the financial crisis of 2008, projects in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere have been cancelled, although the first few large-scale integrated projects have recently begun operation. ̽��ֱ��Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that without CCS, the costs associated with slowing global warming will double.

According to Reiner, there are several reasons that CCS seems to have fallen out of favour with both private and public sector funders. ̽��ֱ��first is cost – a single CCS demonstration plant costs in the range of $1 billion. Unlike solar or wind, which can be demonstrated at a much smaller scale, CCS can only be demonstrated at a large scale, driven by the size of commercial-scale power plants and the need to characterise the geological formations which will store the CO₂.

“Scaling up any new technology is difficult, but it’s that much harder if you’re working in billion-dollar chunks,” said Reiner. “At 10 or even 100 million dollars, you will be able to find ways to fund the research & development. But being really serious about demonstrating CCS and making it work means allocating very large sums at a time when national budgets are still under stress after the global financial crisis.”

Another reason is commercial pressures and timescales. “ ̽��ֱ��nature of demonstration is that you work out the kinks – you find out what works and what doesn’t, and you learn from it,” said Reiner. “It’s what’s done in science or in research and development all the time: you expect that nine of ten ideas won’t work, that nine of ten oil wells you drill won’t turn up anything, that nine of ten new drug candidates will fail. Whereas firms can make ample returns on a major oil discovery or a blockbuster drug to make up for the many failures along the way, that is clearly not the case for CCS, so the answer is almost certainly government funding or mandates.

“ ̽��ֱ��scale of CCS and the fact that it’s at the demonstration rather than the research and development phase also means that you don’t get to play around with the technology as such – you’re essentially at the stage where, to use a gambling analogy, you’re putting all your money on red 32 or black 29. And when a certain approach turns out to be more expensive than expected, it’s easy for nay-sayers to dismiss the whole technology, rather than to consider how to learn from that failure and move forward.”

There is also the issue that before 2008 countries thought they would each be developing their own portfolios of projects and so they focused inward, rather than working together to develop a global portfolio of large-scale CCS demonstrations. In the rush to fund CCS projects between 2005 and 2009, countries assembled projects independently, and now only a handful of those projects remain.

According to Reiner, building a global portfolio, where countries learn from each other’s projects, will assist in learning through diversity and replication, ‘de-risking’ the technology and determining whether it ever emerges from the demonstration phase.

“If we’re not going to get CCS to happen, it’s hard to imagine getting the dramatic emissions reductions we need to limit global warming to two degrees – or three degrees, for that matter,” he said. “However, there’s an inherent tension in developing CCS – it is not a single technology, but a whole suite and if there are six CCS paths we can go down, it’s almost impossible to know sitting where we are now which is the right path. Somewhat ironically, we have to be willing to invest in these high-cost gambles or we will never be able to deliver an affordable, low-carbon energy system.”

Reference:
David M. Reiner. ‘Learning through a portfolio of carbon capture and storage demonstration projects.’ Nature Energy (2016). DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2015.11

Governments should not be abandoning carbon capture and storage, argues a Cambridge researcher, as it is the only realistic way of dramatically reducing carbon emissions. Instead, they should be investing in global approaches to learn what works – and what doesn’t.

If we’re serious about meeting aggressive national or global emissions targets, the only way to do it affordably is with carbon capture and storage

David Reiner

John Fowler

Power plant

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Putting a price on our future

lw355 — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 15:47:26 +0000

How can businesses value and manage their dependencies and impacts on the natural world? How can banks be encouraged to make clean energy investments? As sustainability moves up the agenda, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL) is linking Cambridge academics with international businesses to help their leaders make responsible decisions for the long-term.

“Companies are starting to think about the ecological impact of their activities across their supply chain,” said Dr Bhaskar Vira, ̽��ֱ�� Senior Lecturer in the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Geography. “We’re trying to put a real economic value on natural resources.” Production of many mass market consumables, from beer to chocolate, takes advantage of many natural resources that aren’t currently factored into operational costs.

“A global food manufacturer, for example, wants to be aware of all the ingredients that have gone into one of its flagship confectionary products, and the way in which they’ve been grown and sourced,” said Vira. “Throughout that supply chain there may be impacts on the environment that aren’t currently factored into the price of the product.” Similarly, an agribusiness giant depends on tomatoes supplied by farmers in California – a water-scarce region. Working with CPSL, we’re are asking whether there is something this company can do to encourage farmers to be more water efficient in their working practices.”

“If a company was asked to pay for the groundwater used in its factories, how much would it cost? Water use might be 10% of the overall operating budget, and that’s the kind of figure a company might start to take seriously. At the moment they don’t need to pay this cost, but if a government starts to regulate in the future they might need to. Similarly, if the government of California starts to regulate farming practices and the cost of tomatoes suddenly shoots up, certain companies need to factor this into their long-term business planning. It makes good strategic sense to anticipate some of these future changes.”

CPSL has drawn together a group of companies in the food, agriculture, and extractive industries, into a project called ‘Right Values for Externalities’, whose goal is to reflect the external costs incurred in product lifecycles on their balance sheets. “We created teams of one economist and one ecologist to work on case studies with companies, using company data to understand what its impact might be,” said Vira, who provided scientific guidance for this project, co-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council as part of the Valuing Nature Network (www.valuing-nature.net). ̽��ֱ��work has resulted in the creation of practical guidance for companies wishing to undertake an evaluation of external impacts associated with their activities, and to understand how these risks can be anticipated and prioritised in their decision-making.

̽��ֱ��project is one of many convened by CPSL, whose Director Polly Courtice said “we’re facing a perfect storm of having to provide food, energy and water for a population that’s growing from seven billion to nine billion, and the pressures this puts on society. CPSL is having a continuous series of conversations with businesses to work out how to respond to these challenges.

“We are driven by how we can help to promote change, and avert environmental and social crises that are much nearer to the present day than we used to think,” said Courtice. Vira added, “We want to use our case studies as examples of what other businesses should be thinking about. CPSL plays a key role in this as a trusted intermediary between the ̽��ֱ�� and businesses –that trust is developed through long term relationships.”

At a different level of engagement, Professor Danny Ralph, Academic Director of the Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School, is involved in a CPSL project aimed at finding ways to unlock greater mainstream investment in clean energy. “ ̽��ֱ��Banking Environment Initiative is a means of tackling key sustainability issues,” he said. CPSL drew together six banks and six energy companies, and linked them with the Centre for Risk Studies, and with Dr Chi Kong Chyong and Dr David Reiner in the Judge’s Energy Policy Research Group, to investigate valuation models for clean energy investments.

“Banks want to invest in companies they believe will cope in the future. But green technologies are expensive, and energy companies making these investments are unlikely to recoup their costs. Should an institutional investor choose a company that appears to be very forward-looking in its R&D and is moving towards green technologies, but isn’t very ‘capital efficient’, over a more focused one?” asked Ralph. “A long-term investor needs to ask which companies are positioning themselves so they can adapt their basic products to a world we can’t even predict.”

Using a methodology called real options analysis, the Cambridge team showed the importance of building in a degree of flexibility, to account for decision-making around uncertain future market conditions. “In a standard banking valuation, a company would diversify its risks,” explained Ralph. “But climate change, for example, is affecting the whole world. You can’t diversify something we’re all going to face together. What we’ve done is highlight that investors need to stop thinking about diversification in terms of a portfolio where the risks are unrelated. This changes the nature of the uncertainty around investment risk.”

“Danny’s work is helping to drive a conversation in the industry about valuation methods, and is having a big impact on the thinking of these banks,” said Dr Jake Reynolds, CPSL’s Director of Business Platforms. “If we really want to effect change, we have to find a way to align sustainability with business models, and that means banks discussing this with their clients. This project has provided a brilliant platform for that - these conversations about clean energy were just not happening before.”

“We are working with people dealing with real problems that our research community may have a great deal to contribute to,” said Courtice. “We try to act as a bridge between the knowledge base in the ̽��ֱ�� and that in the business community, and create opportunities for them to interact. We’re looking for areas of mutual interest and we’re maintaining the engagement long enough for the issues to emerge.”

CPSL’s Executive Education programmes raise awareness of issues from climate change to resource scarcity to transport. Around 6,000 business leaders have now completed a programme, and on leaving have become part of CPSL’s global Sustainability Network.

A key focus of CPSL’s work now is to bring this network into closer contact with the ̽��ֱ��’s research. A series of business platforms have been set up, bringing together senior practitioners with shared interests in particular business problems from climate change and natural capital depletion, to responsible investment and product innovation. ̽��ֱ��aim is to help practitioners identify what needs to change, and to take practical action to achieve this with their peers.

“Leaders come on our Executive Education programmes and then ask what they can do to change their organisations,” said Reynolds. “They realise that even if they became the world’s most sustainable company that wouldn’t solve the problem because their peers may not be with them, or their suppliers, or their clients, or government policy might be tilting business the other way. So they start thinking about their industry and the wider influence it has over the economy. Many come to the conclusion that they have to work together on these big problems rather than go it alone.”

Helping big businesses consider their impact on the environment is leading to a re-evaluation of activities to combine profitability with sustainability.

If we really want to effect change, we have to find a way to align sustainability with business models

Jake Reynolds

Ryan Hyde on flickr

Tha'll do

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Deep issues: communicating CCS

lw355 — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:00:17 +0000

CCS has been described by advocates as the single biggest lever to combat climate change. ̽��ֱ��technology – which aims to capture carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuel power stations and store it safely and permanently deep underground – has, said Rt Hon. Chris Huhne MP, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, “a key part to play in ensuring that we can keep the lights on at the same time as fighting climate change.”

Despite the enthusiasm, no commercial-scale CCS projects for power plants are yet in operation. For governments and industry, the main barrier is cost. By contrast, for environmental groups, concerns have been voiced about the continued use of fossil fuels and the impact on their preferred options such as renewable energy sources.

Concerns about CCS also extend to local populations, as Dr David Reiner from Cambridge Judge Business School explained: “Recent early stage CCS projects in Germany, the Netherlands and America have all generated substantial local opposition and led to projects failing. Aside from technical progress that will bring down costs, more needs to be learned about what factors will affect the chances of CCS becoming widely adopted.”

His research team, together with colleagues from across Europe, has focused on how information about CCS is communicated, asking whether key lessons can be learned that will affect the technology’s deployment.

Communication strategy

A key step was to carry out a global review of CCS communication practices: who is communicating what aspects of CCS, and why? “We found that most CCS communication, which is principally via websites, is very good at explaining the technological processes involved. But, in areas that are likely to be of most concern to society, such as costs, policy alternatives and wider social implications, there is scant coverage,” said Dr Reiner. “Moreover, most of the information about CCS is from sources that are perceived by the general public as ‘less trusted’, such as business and governments, rather than research institutions, established media or NGOs.”

These are serious obstacles believe the researchers, particularly as their findings indicate that environmentalists base their evaluations about CCS on what role they believe it will play in society rather than on whether they think CCS technology works or not. This view of environmental activists is based on data the researchers gathered in Climate Camps – grassroots movements that advocate direct action on climate change – and Green Party conferences in the UK. Participants at both displayed considerable understanding of the issues involved.

When it comes to the general public, though, the level of understanding of CCS was found to be considerably less. ̽��ֱ��research team investigated the opinions and perceptions of CCS by residents in five European Union member states who live in the region of planned projects. “One major finding was that if the residents felt that the planning process was fair or that their local community had been treated fairly in the past, this had a direct relationship to their attitudes towards the local project,” added Dr Reiner.

Avoiding a ‘perfect storm’

“Our research has shown that many of the first projects have engendered a type of ‘perfect storm’, whereby the communication with the local community is problematic, is presented as a fait accompli and is provided by ‘less-trusted’ sources, such as the developers,” explained Dr Reiner. “In addition, the community is frequently sceptical from the start because of previous bad experiences with local infrastructure planning.”

̽��ֱ��researchers believe that improving communications and thinking more carefully about the social characteristics of the project at the design stage will reduce the likelihood of opposition. Under certain conditions, they found that even many strident environmental activists are willing to support (or at least not oppose) CCS.

“There is no magic formula,” he added, “but taking the extra time needed to bring in more-trusted voices such as university scientists or environmental groups will increase the likelihood that these first projects, and ultimately CCS more generally, will be successful.”

New research has identified communication gaps that could hinder the deployment of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies to mitigate climate change.

Most of the information about CCS is from sources that are perceived by the general public as ‘less trusted’, such as business and governments, rather than research institutions, established media or NGOs.

Dr David Reiner

lewishamdreamer on flickr

Demonstration banner

Cambridge Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage launched

A recently launched Centre, led by Director Professor Mike Bickle (Department of Earth Sciences), with Dr Stuart Scott (Department of Engineering) and Dr David Reiner, will facilitate collaborative research and act as a focal point for CCS research at Cambridge.

For more information, please visit www.ccs.cam.ac.uk/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Towards a smarter electricity future

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:39:58 +0000

Global efforts to address climate change will involve the massive roll-out of existing low carbon energy technologies as well as the development of new technologies, together with increased energy efficiency, fundamental behavioural shifts, and processes that will reduce carbon emissions, all on an unprecedented scale. Such change requires smart engineers, willing industries and green consumers. But it also requires getting the regulatory framework structures and policies right at national and international levels.

A better understanding of these incentives and policies forms part of the work of the Electric Policy Research Group (EPRG), along with analysis of liberalised energy markets, and pricing carbon via taxes or emissions trading.

This joint research programme between the Faculty of Economics and Judge Business School was launched in 2005, when the EPRG was awarded a five-year, £2.38 million grant from Research Councils UK (RCUK), expanding on the work of the Cambridge-MIT Institute Electricity Project.

Professor David Newbery, Director of the EPRG, leads a group that now numbers more than 30 researchers, including a team of 12 faculty and senior research staff, together with PhD students and Associates from departments across Cambridge and other leading institutions. ̽��ֱ��research team is built around core expertise in economics and policy, with active collaboration between experts from different academic traditions, and draws on insights from engineering, political science and law. ̽��ֱ��group is also supported by the industry and government sponsors of its Energy Policy Forum, which helps leverage research funding and enhances the EPRG’s ability to respond to important research questions as they arise.

Two recently completed EPRG research projects exemplify the types of analyses that are helping the electricity industry evolve: the risks and incentives for taking forward carbon capture and storage (CCS), and the opportunities for increasing energy efficiency through smart metering, both of which are key elements in the UK’s new Low Carbon Transition Plan.

CCS: risks and incentives

A study sponsored by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change has analysed the incentives needed to reduce emissions from fossil-fired electricity generation.

̽��ֱ��idea behind CCS is to capture the CO₂ emitted from power plants burning fossil fuels and to store it safely in geological formations such as depleted oil fields. By 2015, the European Union (EU) aims to have up to 12 commercial-scale CCS demonstration projects deployed across Europe, but as of today there are still no commercial projects operating and each project is expected to cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

With so much at stake, a competition has been launched by the UK Government to build one of the world’s first commercial-scale CCS power plants in the UK. This was followed by recent announcements of support for CCS at the level of the EU, and a UK Government commitment of up to four demonstration plants. But how to select the projects? A study led by Dr David Reiner and Professor David Newbery set out to identify the key risks in designing the project selection process and to examine the interactions between incentives for CCS at the EU level and those at the national level.

Bringing together experts on auction design, game theory and R&D policy, the study examined European support schemes in greater detail. In addition to stimulus spending of over €1 billion (up to €180 million per project), the EU has earmarked 300 million allowances under the EU Emissions Trading Systems to support CCS and innovative renewables technologies (up to 45 million allowances per project). Several risks were identified in designing the project selection process, including the carbon price risk, the variable cost risk, the technological risk and inefficiencies such as the effect of firms colluding or possessing information unavailable to governments. To overcome these concerns, a Technology Category Auction was proposed that would deliver learning from diversity (validation of the main available technological options) rather than learning by doing.

̽��ֱ��hope is that research such as this can help governments put in place policy frameworks at national and international levels that will enable the CCS demonstration phase to be conducted in a manner that is both effective, by demonstrating a range of CCS technologies across Europe, and accomplishes it at least cost.

Examining the prospects for smart metering

Could smart meters be the answer to promoting efficient, flexible and sustainable energy consumption?

Decarbonising the electricity system is just part of the story. Achieving the UK’s target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2050 will involve perhaps as much as a 50% or more improvement in energy efficiency relative to business as usual. A key part of any climate change strategy therefore is to change the nature of the relationship between the energy services that people need and the amount of energy that is supplied. One mechanism for delivering this is the so-called smart electricity meter – a two-way real-time communication between the household and the electricity grid that enables demand to be varied in response to available supply.

̽��ֱ��UK Government is currently in a two-year consultation period prior to announcing its strategy for how to roll out smart meters to all households by 2020 in line with the EU Energy Services Directive. Dr Michael Pollitt and colleagues Dr Tooraj Jamasb and Aoife Brophy Haney in the EPRG have been examining the prospects for smart meters in the light of international roll-outs that have already occurred.

Currently, we have an electricity system in which supply is largely driven by demand. At the household level, most homes have a ‘dumb’ electricity meter that records cumulative consumption to date. Individuals have very poor information about their instantaneous electricity consumption, and hence may be consuming more energy than they need. It also means that individual electricity demands are unable to respond to the situation of the electricity system as a whole. A ‘smart’ electricity meter would address both of these problems and be an essential part of delivering an electricity system based on the concept of energy services rather than consumption.

̽��ֱ��EPRG study is providing a comprehensive framework for assessing the costs and benefits of smart meters. Data from Ontario and California show that the introduction of smart metering can have two immediate impacts on the electricity system. It might reduce electricity consumption by 5–7% simply by giving people real-time information on their electricity use. It can also allow for the variation of electricity prices across the day to better reflect the costliness of the generation required at that time. Such real-time pricing can result in shifts in peak energy consumption of 8–13% of total electricity demand.

However, these two effects are only the start of the possibilities that smart meters offer. Smart meters are central to the use of information technology to seamlessly manage household energy consumption and production. A smart meter can also ensure that any electricity produced by the household (via micro-combined heat and power or solar panels) can be sold to the grid at a price that reflects its real-time value.

Smart metering research is part of the work that the EPRG has been carrying out for the past three years in collaboration with a consortium of nine universities under the FlexNet project. Funded by £7 million from the Economic and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the project as a whole is looking at the evolution of the UK electricity system to 2050. ̽��ֱ��research on smart metering has been submitted to the UK Government to assist in its assessment of the best way to roll out smart meters.

For more information, please contact the authors Dr David Reiner (d.reiner@jbs.cam.ac. uk) and Dr Michael Pollitt (m.pollitt@jbs.cam.ac.uk) at Judge Business School and Professor David Newbery (dmgn@econ.cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Economics or visit www.eprg.group.cam.ac.uk/

̽��ֱ��Electricity Policy Research Group – a programme that spans the Faculty of Economics and Judge Business School – is providing world-class analysis to support an evolving electricity industry.

Change requires smart engineers, willing industries and green consumers. But it also requires getting the regulatory framework structures and policies right at national and international levels.

shirokazan on Flickr

Drax Power Station

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes