Abstract

Cities are the largest energy consumer by far. In the UK, around 2/3 of energy demand stems from running buildings and ground transport, mostly in urban areas. In the wider world, rapid urbanisation and ever rising standard of urban living seem insatiable in their demand for energy. The Energy Efficient Cities Initiative is a new inter-disciplinary research project at Cambridge. It explores the deployment of a wide range of technologies from now to 2050, and assesses their effectiveness in reducing energy use and environmental impacts against the context of global trends, policy and planning. The system-level analysis enables a robust scaling-up of the impact of technological innovations to the city, and accounts for rebound effects and trade-offs over time. In this lecture, a progress report will be given on the construction of a new generation of integrated simulation models and their use in assessing technology and policy options.

Ruchi Choudhary specializes in building simulation with a particular interest in multicriteria modelling of energy demand and environmental characteristics of the built environment. Her research is on simulation-based optimization methodologies for energy management and performance assessment of buildings. Steven Barrett’s main research interests are in quantifying and mitigating the environmental impacts of the transport sector. Steven focuses on system-level assessments of technological and regulatory environmental mitigation strategies related to air quality, climate change and energy efficiency. Ying Jin has been building computer simulation models of cities, and using them as experimental platforms to appraise medium to long term policy and technology scenarios.