Green Gown Awards 2015 – Research and Development - The University of Nottingham - Finalist

Creative Energy Homes: Low-Energy and Zero-Carbon Housing – a living test-site for energy efficient technologies

A long-term development of seven “Creative Energy Homes” (CEH) on the University of Nottingham campus provides a living test-site for leading firms, including E.ON, David Wilson Homes, BASF, Tarmac, Roger Bullivant, Saint Gobain, Igloo Blueprint and Mark Group to work with the University of Nottingham to investigate the integration of energy efficient technologies into houses.

As a result of this work, Lovell homes has won a number of sustainable housing contracts, Roger Bullivant have developed and installed 30 SystemFirst™ foundation systems and Igloo Blueprint have built £7M worth of new homes.

The research findings have helped inform the UK Government’s “Green Deal” strategy, the Nottingham Community Climate Change Strategy and received widespread acclaim through a number of public engagement activities reaching out to over 5 million people.

Top 3 learnings

1 Never underestimate the public and industry interest in the work you are doing and plan ahead for important research demonstration activity. For us, low energy housing research really captured public interest and we initially underestimated the attention the project received from public/industry and had to find additional resource for dissemination activity at the start of the project   

2 Good teamwork for planning delivery and undertaking the project was an essential part of the successful delivery

3 As our research was industry linked, it was important to find other avenues for research publication other than traditional academic research journals which industry will not read.

Videos

• Creative Energy Homes: Low-Energy and Zero-Carbon Housing – a living test-site for energy efficient technologies (click to hide)