LSBU's GreenSCIES project wins two major awards
LSBU's GreenSCIES project has won two major awards for its research into low carbon technologies.
The Institute of Refrigeration awarded GreenSCIES its Kenneth Lightfoot Medal for best talk or webinar given to members in the previous 12 months. The winner is selected by popular vote and the prize includes an engraved medal and a cheque for £500 provided by Lightfoot Defence.
GreenSCIES also won for the Integrated Energy category at the Association for Decentralised Energy Awards. The prize was given for supplying the local community through a 5th generation District Heating network harvesting waste heat.
GreenSCIES is funded by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund on Prospering From the Energy Revolution. The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund brings together the UK’s word-leading research with business to meet the major industrial and societal changes of our time. LSBU's London Centre for Energy Engineering (LCEE) in the School of Engineering is leading the GreenSCIES project.
GreenSCIES – a fifth generation network
At the heart of GreenSCIES is a fifth-generation network - a water loop at ambient temperature which enables the system to actively share heat and cooling. For instance, a data centre requires cooling all year round. This waste heat can be harnessed by the fifth-generation heat network and upgraded using heat pumps to provide heating and hot water to local residents.
The uptake of renewable power, opens up the use of electrically driven heat pumps to deliver low carbon heating. Sharing heat in this way means that it’s possible to deliver heating and cooling at the same time with one system, and with it, considerable energy savings.
Fifth-generation networks are also able to operate flexibly in response to the supply of renewable energy from the electricity grid. There is often an abundance of renewable energy available and sometimes much more than we need. To accommodate this excess energy, GreenSCIES uses technologies that operate flexibly like heat pumps in response to electricity prices.
When there is excess electricity available at low prices we can run the heat pumps and store this excess energy in thermal stores. Conversely, at peak demand when electricity prices are high, we can turn down our heat pumps for a short period without anyone noticing. We can also access battery storage via electric vehicles through vehicle to grid technology.