Inside the Energy House 2.0

Academic Richard Fitton talks to Utility Week about the new £16 million research and testing facility, dubbed Energy House 2.0, currently under construction at the University of Salford. We also speak to Phil Steele, future technologies evangelist Octopus Energy – one of its main partners on the project. 

As the name suggests, Energy House 2.0 is a follow-on to an earlier project known as Salford Energy House – an environmentally controlled laboratory chamber, in which a full-sized two-bedroom house was assembled.

The house was built to replicate a typical early 1900s end-of-terrace property in Manchester, with reclaimed bricks, single-pane wooden-framed windows and wooden floorboards with air gaps underneath. Starting from this baseline, researchers installed and then tested various energy efficiency upgrades – cavity insulation, wall insultation and double-glazing, among others.

Energy House 2.0 will be “far bigger”, explains Fitton, a reader in energy performance of buildings. “There’s two environmental chambers in there with enough space for four houses in total – that’s two houses in each chamber.”

They will continue their work on retrofitted properties, reconstructing another old house owned by the university: “Let’s face it. The statistics around our housing stock are pretty stark. Retrofit is clearly required. We’re not replacing the housing stock at an accelerated rate.

“These buildings will still be with us for decades to come, I imagine, and it’s not going to go away, this problem of them being uninsulated. We pride ourselves on our retrofit research and it will continue for Energy House 2.0, without a shadow of a doubt.”

But he adds, the main focus will be on new build properties from “around the world”.

“We can simulate different weather conditions in there so from minus 20 degrees to plus 40 – more wind, more rain, more solar radiation and more snow. That’s going to give us the ability to recreate the climate in 95 per cent of the populated parts of the globe. Not the landmass of the globe. Obviously, the Antarctic isn’t something that we would classify as one of our main areas.”

Fitton continues: “You could take a house that may be designed for somewhere like Norway, for instance, with super insulation and see how it works in different climates. How would a house that was designed and built for Texas work going up towards the north of Scotland?

“We can put them all through these different climatic conditions. The houses and the chamber will be built to allow people to live in the homes as well. I think that’s really important; the fact that there will be people that can live in these buildings as we test them under different conditions. People will be experiencing the homes and what it feels like when the weather is cold and rainy and windy outside.”

And it won’t just be the buildings themselves that will be put through their paces. The team will also be testing the various low-carbon technologies that are expected to feature in the homes of the future.

Take heating, for example: “We will have systems in there that allow us to use hydrogen, electric direct or infrared heating, air-source heat pumps, ground-source heat pumps.”

“There’s a lot of discussion in the UK around hydrogen and air-source heat pumps – the whole idea of can the grid cope with these things,” he says.

“What we need to understand is the actual running practices of the home under different conditions and that’s what we do. We stress test the home. We can test it in the winter, in the spring, in the summer, all within about a week so we will be able to tell the exact demand on an air-source heat pump, for instance, over a typical year.

“We’ll be able to accelerate that process on different types of houses with different levels of insulation.”

Fitton says: “I’m expecting that we’ll be able to generate a huge quantity of data that allows us to find out what stress we’re putting on the grid when we make a move to either the electrification of heat or a different method of heating through gas.”

“Again, we’re going to be taking a global approach so we’re not necessarily just talking about heating,” he adds. “We may be doing cooling in there as well.”

They will also be looking at different types of storage, and not just conventional batteries: “There have been a couple of really interesting studies around storing energy in bricks, whether that’s thermal or whether its electric. That’s something that’s very close to where we want to be.

“People need to understand that a solid masonry building can store energy if its insulated in the right places. The storage of energy is key to what we’re doing.”

There will even be room to park vehicles outside and test them as well. The university has already been approached by companies looking to test caravans and sleeper rigs for trucks.

Crucially, Fitton says they will explore how different technologies can be integrated together: “We need to start seeing the home as a system rather than a disparate collection of parts – your car, your air-source heat pump, your solar PV, your battery and the fabric of the building. The fabric of the building is really important for storing particularly heat energy and the way it moves that energy as well.”

Organisations making use of the facility – from “one-man bands” all the way up to “multi-billion-pound energy firms” – will be grouped together so their products and services can be tested alongside each other.

Octopus Energy will act as the supplier for the houses. The company’s future technologies evangelist, Phil Steele, explains: “We’ll put smart meters in there and we’ll put some of the latest energy technology in there to measure the performance.” 

He says the meters will provide the company with valuable insights: “If you look at a smart meter today, we receive 30-minute data. We receive that overnight then we bill customers on things like the Agile tariff-based prices on the wholesale market every 30 minutes.

“But actually, the meter itself has got data that is as granular as every 10 seconds. If you use either an in-home display or another bit of technology known as a consumer access device, they can access that close to real time data.

“That means you can then start to look at what is consuming that energy and how it’s being consumed and what you might do to improve the energy consumption. You can look at fridge-freezers, dishwashers, dryers and washing machines, and start to analyse whether they could be used at different times of day. Could they be balanced against battery storage systems with solar generation or with a vehicle in the driveway that’s providing vehicle-to-grid capabilities as well?”

He says the lab will enable companies like Octopus to properly justify their propositions to customers, noting that: “It’s too easy for unsubstantiated claims to be made about energy-saving technologies and construction methods and the benefits you get from measuring and managing energy in an intelligent way.”

This sentiment is echoed by Fitton, who says: “The world of energy is going to get very, very complicated very soon… The whole idea of the agile tariff, the time-of-use tariff and half-hourly settlement could make this consumer journey very complicated and we need to have things in place that allow for this to be simplified. But we can’t do that unless we demonstrate that we can do it.

“We have a concept called the experimental demonstration. We all like to build houses out in a field where we can show off what we can do. We have a big fancy building that’s got all the things hanging off it. What we need to do is build a big fancy building with all the things hanging off it in a controlled conditions so we can carry out experimentation and demonstrate to the public a government and other interested parties that it all works.”

With this in mind, Fitton says there will be an “open door” to those interested in finding out more: “Come and look at what we’re doing. Here’s the evidence and the data behind it. And I think that is a powerful thing to do.”

The facility is expected to be completed by December 2021, with the first homes being opened to the public by March 2022. Fitton says it will be around for a long time after that: “This a substantial investment that will last for the life of the building. Probably, my lifetime.”