Local low energy futures

This project aims to downscale national energy demand scenarios for the UK to a local scale. This is a collaborative project between the Place and Futures themes building on the Positive Low Energy Futures (PLEF) scenarios developed under the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS). 

The PLEF scenarios explored transformative changes in how energy is used across different sectors, including housing, mobility, nutrition, and materials and products. By evaluating place-based variation in energy use for each of these sectors, we aim to offer an assessment of local opportunities for decarbonisation. 

The downscaled scenarios could be used to evaluate the spatial implications of national policies, as well as what kinds of local policies and delivery models could be in place to achieve the scenarios. 

The project aims to deliver the following objectives: 

• Review existing approaches to downscaling national energy scenarios and their strengths, weaknesses and applications to the current project; 

• Develop a novel methodology for downscaling national energy demand scenarios across a number of sectors; 

• Apply the new downscaling methodology to the Positive Low Energy Future scenarios and explore the transferability of the framework to other national scenarios; 

• Highlight the priority areas for local area decarbonisation to guide the development of supportive policy. 

The project will use a range of methods to develop the scenarios, including: 

• A systematic review to evaluate existing downscaling methodologies; 

• Scenario modelling to develop local energy demand scenarios for the sectors of interest for each local area of the UK.