De-Carbonising Heating
Research group: professor Andrew Woods
The Problem
A large amount of energy is used to provide heat in buildings. Decarbonising heating is essential.
Work Needed
New strategies are required that allow reducing carbon emissions from heating.
Our Work
We are monitoring the heating demand in St. John’s College, Cambridge, and developing new strategies to reduce its carbon intensity.
Our work in St. John’s College
Decarbonising the heating of buildings represents one of the major challenges for the energy transition. The strategies we are developing to reduce emissions from heating include the installation of heat pump systems, upgrading the fabric of buildings, and designing novel control systems to reduce energy usage. These approaches are being combined in a major case study at St. John’s College, Cambridge and across the wider university
We are working on an exciting project focused on the de-carbonisation of heating using heat pumps in Cambridge.
Through this work, we are exploring inter-seasonal storage of thermal energy in St. John’s College, Cambridge with the purpose of improving the efficiency of the heat pump system.
The new system will source its thermal energy from boreholes and air source heat pumps. It will collect summer thermal energy during the warmer months of the year, store it, and use it to heat the college in the winter.