Using buildings to reduce the UK energy demand – generate, release, and store technologies

Energy Futures Lab hosts a seminar from Dr Jenny Baker of the University of Swansea on how buildings can be used to reduce the UK’s energy demand.

Abstract

SPECIFIC’s Active Buildings integrate solar technology into one system, to generate, store and release their own energy – both heat and electricity. Active Buildings have the potential to address one of the biggest challenges facing the UK and the world: a low carbon, affordable and secure energy supply.

This talk will discuss the benefits of active buildings and how they can reduce the demand at peak times on the grid, using case studies of both academic buildings and low cost council homes. It will then examine the technological challenges to be overcome and the research being undertaken at SPECIFIC IKC on new materials and processes for generation and storage of energy.

Focus will be given to the latest developments in photovoltaics alongside performance characteristics of different energy storage technolgies.

Biography

Jenny has been a manufacturing engineer for 20 years. She started her career in aerospace manufacturing at Rolls-Royce, working to develop a closed loop system for production, manufacture, use and recycling of titanium alloys without a reduction in quality – essential for a safety critical applications.

Since 2011 she has worked at Swansea Unviersity and is a Technology Transfer Fellow at SPECIFIC IKC where she researches new manufacturing methods for perovskite photovoltaics and sodium ion batteries. This involves producing demonstrators that are tested in the SPECIFIC IKC demobuildings the active classroom, opened Sept 2016 and the active office, opened June 2018.

Venue

The talk will be held in Room 611 of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (building 16 on the campus map). The room is known as the Gabor Suite.

If you are entering the building from Dalby Court/through the building’s main entrance take the lift to the sixth floor, turn right through the double doors and it is near the end on your left hand side.