In many developing countries, rising energy demand, and consequently carbon emissions, is seen as an unequivocal indicator of increasing prosperity. This trajectory has important consequences not just for global carbon emissions but for the ability of countries such as India to achieve its developmental goals. This is because, in most developing countries, growth in energy demand far outstrips growth in supply due to the large capital investment required to build energy infrastructure. Thus, even people *with* access to energy networks often find that they are unable to meet their comfort needs due to supply shortages. However, the most critical problem is often not mean demand - e.g. mean per capita energy demand in India is only 13% that of the UK - but rather **peak demand** as it lays immense stress on already fragile networks. Hence, people's ability to attain comfortable internal conditions is compromised at the precise time that they need it the most - during extreme heat or cold. This project directly addresses the problem of peak demand reduction by aiming to eliminate peak demand in buildings, where it is created. In most developing countries, the vast majority of the building stock of the future is still to be built, so there is a real opportunity to decouple economic growth from building energy use whilst ensuring comfortable conditions. We aim to achieve this through laying the foundations for a **new science of zero peak energy building design** for warm climates. This will be achieved through a careful consideration of the weather signal (now and in the future) which is critical for any realistic assessment of mean dan peak energy demand. A second focus is on delivering a method of construction that is compatible not only with the Indian climate but also its building practices and social customs, thus avoiding the trap of an "imported" standard. This will be delivered through the creation of 60 pathways for a range of building types in 6 cities comprising different climates. Finally, we will also consider how loads can be moved between buildings to achieve a smooth demand profile at network level.

Reducing carbon emissions and securing energy supplies are crucial international goals to which energy demand reduction must make a major contribution. On a national level, demand reduction, deployment of new and renewable energy technologies, and decarbonisation of the energy supply are essential if the UK is to meet its legally binding carbon reduction targets. As a result, this area is an important theme within the EPSRC's strategic plan, but one that suffers from historical underinvestment and a serious shortage of appropriately skilled researchers. Major energy demand reductions are required within the working lifetime of Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) graduates, i.e. by 2050. Students will thus have to be capable of identifying and undertaking research that will have an impact within their 35 year post-doctoral career. The challenges will be exacerbated as our population ages, as climate change advances and as fuel prices rise: successful demand reduction requires both detailed technical knowledge and multi-disciplinary skills. The DTC will therefore span the interfaces between traditional disciplines to develop a training programme that teaches the context and process-bound problems of technology deployment, along with the communication and leadership skills needed to initiate real change within the tight time scale required. It will be jointly operated by University College London (UCL) and Loughborough University (LU); two world-class centres of energy research. Through the cross-faculty Energy Institute at UCL and Sustainability Research School at LU, over 80 academics have been identified who are able and willing to supervise DTC students. These experts span the full range of necessary disciplines from science and engineering to ergonomics and design, psychology and sociology through to economics and politics. The reputation of the universities will enable them to attract the very best students to this research area.The DTC will begin with a 1 year joint MRes programme followed by a 3 year PhD programme including a placement abroad and the opportunity for each DTC student to employ an undergraduate intern to assist them. Students will be trained in communication methods and alternative forms of public engagement. They will thus understand the energy challenges faced by the UK, appreciate the international energy landscape, develop people-management and communication skills, and so acquire the competence to make a tangible impact. An annual colloquium will be the focal point of the DTC year acting as a show-case and major mechanism for connection to the wider stakeholder community.The DTC will be led by internationally eminent academics (Prof Robert Lowe, Director, and Prof Kevin J Lomas, Deputy Director), together they have over 50 years of experience in this sector. They will be supported by a management structure headed by an Advisory Board chaired by Pascal Terrien, Director of the European Centre and Laboratories for Energy Efficiency Research and responsible for the Demand Reduction programme of the UK Energy Technology Institute. This will help secure the international, industrial and UK research linkages of the DTC.Students will receive a stipend that is competitive with other DTCs in the energy arena and, for work in certain areas, further enhancement from industrial sponsors. They will have a personal annual research allowance, an excellent research environment and access to resources. Both Universities are committed to energy research at the highest level, and each has invested over 3.2M in academic appointments, infrastructure development and other support, specifically to the energy demand reduction area. Each university will match the EPSRC funded studentships one-for-one, with funding from other sources. This DTC will therefore train at least 100 students over its 8 year life.

The Climate Change Act 2008 requires a 34% cut in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and at least an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050. Residential and commercial buildings account for 25% and 18% of the UK's total CO2 emissions respectively and therefore have a significant role to play in a national decarbonisation strategy. As the UK has some of the oldest and least efficient buildings in Europe, there is substantial scope for improving the efficiency of energy end-use within UK buildings. However efforts to improve building energy efficiency, specifically the thermal efficiency of the building fabric, have to date focused primarily on the analysis and assessment of single properties. The slow uptake of insulation measures through the Green Deal and Energy Companies Obligation testifies to the difficulty of achieving these changes on a house-by-house basis. If the UK is to achieve its energy and climate policy targets, then a more ambitious whole-city approach to building energy improvements is needed. Technical innovations in remote sensing and infrared thermography mean that it is now possible to conduct building efficiency surveys at a mass scale. The challenge is how such data can be improved (for example moving from 2D plan imagery to 3D models of the built environment) and combined with systems analysis tools to inform effective retrofit strategies. The Urban Scale Building Energy Network will investigate this research challenge by bringing together five academic co-investigators with disciplinary expertise from across the building retrofit value chain from remote autonomous sensing to building physics, energy systems design, consumer behaviour and policy. Working with two experienced mentors from the fields of energy systems and building energy services, the co-investigators will undertake a series of activities in collaboration with project partners from industry and government to better understand the research challenge and develop roadmaps for future research. The activities include: - Two workshops and a series of bilateral meetings for the academic team to learn about each other's expertise and how it can be coordinated and brought to bear on the research challenge. The project mentors will play a crucial role here, helping the co-investigators to create personal development plans that will build both technical and non-technical skills for successful careers. - A workshop with over 20 representatives from government and industry to discuss previous experience and the perceived obstacles to more ambitious building energy retrofits. - An active online communications strategy incorporating a project website, YouTube videos, and a Twitter hashtag campaign in order to engage the general public and understand how households and commercial building occupants understand the challenge of transforming the UK's building stock. - A feasibility study to summarize the state of the art in new sensing technologies and analysis techniques for building thermal energy performance assessment and to identify major outstanding challenges for future research proposals. The proposed network will therefore facilitate collaboration between academics, industry, government and the general public to address a question of great national importance. The project outputs will help to create a wider understanding of the specific challenges facing the UK's aspirations for the transformation of its building stock as well as highlighting potentially fruitful avenues for research. The network therefore aspires to build upon this twelve-month programme of work and develop significant long-term research collaborations with benefits for academic knowledge, society and the wider economy.

Permeable (fast draining) infrastructure will reduce the impact from climate change and urbanisation related flooding, which has a projected annual global cost of £500bn by 2030. Flooding is expected to cost the UK economy £27bn annually by 2080, without investment in flood resilient infrastructure. Along with the 2020 government plan for green infrastructure development, it is timely to invest in flood resilient permeable infrastructure. An extreme example of flood-affected infrastructure are airport pavements, impacted by stormwater and ice/snow build-up causing aircraft skidding. Skidding accounts for nearly half of all post 1990 major global commercial air crashes. In 2017 a Heathrow snow event grounded over 50,000 passengers and required a hurried £10m purchase of de-icing equipment. The current methods for preventing ice/snow build-up damage the environment, aircraft components and runway surfaces, increasing infrastructure maintenance costs. Airport operators, seeking to address these concerns, have expressed a strong desire to use permeable concrete technology to keep infrastructure clear. Permeable concrete pavements are one of the most promising mitigation strategies to prevent surface flooding, they rapidly drain stormwater through otherwise impermeable infrastructure. Conventional permeable pavements are, however, prone to clogging, due to debris trapped within the pore network, blocking the pavement and reducing its drainage capacity. The frequent required maintenance degrades performance and service life and is difficult to perform in an active airport. Most importantly, conventional permeable pavements have insufficient strength, making them unsuited for airports. There is an urgent need for a new system that can reliably keep airports clear of standing water and ice/snow. I recently developed next generation clogging resistant permeable pavement (CRP) of uniform pore structure to address infrastructure flooding. It has improved strength (twice as strong >50 MPa) and higher permeability (ten times more) than conventional systems of equal porosity, yet does not clog despite exposure to stormwater sediments. This Fellowship will significantly reengineer my novel pavement to develop the first permeable pavement, with sufficient strength and resilience, for the extreme airport case, while also applicable to less extreme highway, railway and novel green wall scenarios. These step-change advancements will be achieved by steel reinforcement, used in permeable pavements for the first time. The structural performance, material integrity, skid resistance, long-term durability and hydrological (drainage) properties will be assessed for airport suitability and improved if required. This project will be the first to investigate conductive (direct contact) and convective (transmission through air) heat transfer through permeable pavements used in high-value heavy load-bearing infrastructure. I will use heat extracted from the ground (ground source energy system, GSES) in these new pavements to melt the deposited ice/snow and drain away the excess water. Conventional pavements can be heated by conduction only, whereas CRP can be heated through both conduction and convection (via the pores) as the novel pore structure also allows for natural convection. This Fellowship will, through extensive laboratory experimentation, computer modelling and the permanent large-scale deployment at Inverness Airport (spanning across multiple technology readiness levels (1-7), a measure of technology maturity), develop climate change resilient infrastructure materials that can be used to deliver a sustainable built environment resistant to flooding, ice/snow build-up and the harmful heat island effect. To achieve this ambitious goal, I will address significant structural, material, thermal and hydrological challenges with wide reaching economic, environmental and societal benefits to the construction and transportation sector.

Historic rock-mounted lighthouses play a vital role in the safe navigation around perilous reefs. However their longevity is threatened by the battering of waves which may be set to increase with climate change. Virtual navigational aids such as GPS are fallible, and reliance on them can be disastrous. Mariners will therefore continue to need the physical visual aids of these strategic structures. The loss of any reef lighthouse will be incalculable in terms of safety, trade and heritage. Plymouth University has trialled the use of recording instruments to capture limited information on the loading and response of Eddystone Lighthouse, with the support of the General Lighthouse Authorities (GLAs) having legal responsibility to safeguard aids to marine navigation around the British Isles. The study evaluated the extreme logistical constraints of lighthouse operations and the feasibility of using instrumentation to understand the response of the lighthouse to wave loads, with results strongly encouraging a comprehensive study of the load and response environment. Hence a full-scale project is proposed whereby field, laboratory and mathematical/computer modelling methods, novel both individually and collectively, will be used to assess six of the most vulnerable rock lighthouses in the UK and Ireland. Depending on the findings the investigation will then focus on extended full-scale evaluation of one lighthouse for the following two winters. The field instrumentation run by University of Exeter, and which will include modal testing and long term instrumentation will require novel procedures and technologies to be created to deal with the challenging environmental and logistical constraints e.g. of access, timing power. The modal test data will be used to guide the creation, by UCL, of sophisticated multi-scale numerical simulations of lighthouses that can be used with the data to diagnose observed performance in the long-term monitoring. The numerical structural model will also be linked with advanced physical modelling at Plymouth University's COAST Laboratory, and numerical (computational fluid dynamic) simulations. Finally, based on the structural and wave loading models, the long term monitoring will be used to characterize the wave loading in-situ at full scale. Outcomes of the project will be used to inform the comprehensive structural health monitoring of other lighthouses both in the British Isles and further afield through the International Association of Lighthouse Authorities. This will lead to the identification of structural distress and reduction in the risk of failure through preventative measures. Methods developed will also be of relevance to other masonry structures under wave loads so the project team includes a number of industrial partners: AECOM, Atkins, HR Wallingford and the Environment Agency who have interests in this area. As the UK has a large number of ageing coastal defences whose vulnerability to wave load was demonstrated in the winter 2013/14 storms, the applicability of the STORMLAMP findings to these structures is an important additional benefit of the project.