Results: Search for EP/R035288/1 - UK Centre for Research on Energy Demand

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading could help address grid management challenges in a decentralizing electricity system, as well as provide other social and environmental benefits. Many existing and proposed trading schemes are enabled by blockchain, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) relying on cryptographic proof of ownership rather than human intermediaries to establish energy transactions. This study used an online survey experiment (n = 2064) to investigate how consumer demand for blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer energy trading schemes in the United Kingdom varies depending on how the consumer proposition is designed and communicated. The analysis provides some evidence of a preference for schemes offering to meet a higher proportion of participants energy needs and for those operating at the city/region (as compared to national or neighbourhood) level. People were more likely to say they would participate when the scheme was framed as being run by their local council, followed by an energy supplier, community energy organization, and social media company. Anonymity was the most valued DLT characteristic and mentioning blockchains association with Bitcoin led to a substantial decrease in intended uptake. We highlight a range of important questions and implications suggested by these findings for the introduction and operation of P2P trading schemes.

We set out to study how the promise of green 5G is produced and circulated. We conducted an analysis of a UK-focused corpus of documents that represent key sites through which the promise of green 5G is produced, circulated and challenged. By the promise of green 5G we refer to an emerging, overarching, dominant expectation that 5G will produce positive environmental sustainability benefits of various kinds. We employed an analytical approach informed by the sociology of expectations and the concept of technoscientific promises. We asked: what are the particular contents of this promise (i.e. the more specific promises and expectations it is built upon), how do enactors seek to boost its legitimacy and credibility, what activities are involved in its production and circulation and what are its present-day material effects, does the promise exclude or overlook alternative options, and is it challenged? We pursued these aims and questions through a document analysis of a diverse corpus (n=260) comprised of UK newspaper articles and newswire results, and reports and webpage content from industry, standardisation bodies and research consortia.

This data collection includes a User Guide and the anonymised transcripts of 30 semi-structured interviews of #60-90 minutes each, with 31 high household energy consumers, about their homes, appliances, infrastructures, vehicles, and everyday life and travel practices that generate household (domestic and travel-related) energy demand. It also includes the anonymised transcripts of 4 3-hour deliberatively workshops of ~8 public participants and 2 facilitators, one recruited from the interviewees, and the others recruited to represent different levels of domestic and travel-related energy consumption, held to discuss the validity, fairness, effectively and acceptability of four broad policy approaches to reduce (particularly high levels of) household energy consumption: Rationing; Economic (Dis)Incentives; Structural Change; and Behaviour Change

Interviews with actors concerned with local transport decarbonisation in the UK, including challenges related to finance, governance arrangements, and public support. Data were collected using a series of 54 interviews, spread equally across three case study sites: 18 Nottingham, 18 Leeds, and 18 Oxford. Of those, 12 of the Nottingham interviews, all 18 of the Leeds interviews, and 8 of the Oxford interviews are shared in this data deposit (the rest did not give permission for their data to be deposited). The interviews were designed to reveal different local perspectives on areas recent attempts to decarbonise their transport system. The initial introduction to each participant was facilitated by pre-existing professional contacts, after which subsequent participants were identified by snowballing (i.e. feedback from interview participants) in combination with criteria-specific identification (i.e. from a review of published local authority documents

The Place-based Carbon Calculator (PBCC) is a free tool which estimates the per-person carbon footprint for every Lower Super Output Area (LSOA) in England. LSOAs are small statistical areas with a population of about 1,500 - 3,000. Includes data on housing, transport and other consumption emissions. Bulk download data and further information about the data sets are available at https://www.carbon.place/data/.