The User-TEC project: User Practices, Technologies and Residential Energy Consumption

http://sbi.dk/usertec/usertec-user-practices-technologies-and-residential-energy-consumption

A five years multidisciplinary research project supported by The Danish Council for Strategic Research

The housing sector has been identified as the sector with the largest potential for energy savings. Yet in spite of great technical progress, a large part of the savings is left wanting primarily related to the residents’ practices, including still higher expectations of comfort, lacking understanding of the building technologies and technologies that are not adapted to user needs. Therefore, the future energy efficient technology has better to meet the user’s needs and to support their practices in a sustainable direction. This requires deeper understanding of different user practices and their relations to energy consumption.

UserTEC is divided into four work packages with each their purpose:

1. To undertake detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of users everyday practices and how these relate to the households energy consumption
2. To analyse and enhance better communication about households’ energy consumption between end-users, designers, engineers and architects as well as energy companies and utilities.
3. To develop and test new user adapted energy efficient building technologies.
4. To analyse and enhance better user involvement in low energy construction processes as well as in energy refurbishment of existing housing.

Members of the BBP team at Cambridge are working with the Danish Building Research and Aalborg University in collaboration with Oxford University, Linköping University, Delft University of Technology and the Technical University of Denmark. The project has unique data on household energy consumption which will be analysed by a multidisciplinary research team in collaboration with a large number of major companies, utilities and other key players in the housing sector.