• Salary: Grade 6/7 (£27,116 - £33,309)
• Contract: Part-Time 0.6FTE, Open-Ended
• Location: Orkney

Heriot-Watt University has established a reputation for world-class teaching and leading-edge, relevant research, which has made it one of the top UK universities for innovation, business and industry.

Heriot-Watt University has five campuses: three in the UK (Edinburgh, Scottish Borders and Orkney), one in Dubai and one in Malaysia. The University offers a highly distinctive range of degree programmes in the specialist areas of science, engineering, design, business and languages. Heriot-Watt is also Scotland's most international university, boasting the largest international student cohort.

About the Team

The Islands Centre for Net Zero (ICNZ) is being established in the Scottish Islands via a £16.5M component of the Islands Growth Deal. The mission for the ICNZ is to facilitate and innovation with the organisations, companies and communities to accelerate demonstrate and achieve the climate-safe requirement for 80% fossil fuel reduction by 2030. Heriot-Watt University is leading the academic action research programme on transition engineering for systemic emergent shift through real-life projects. The RA position is located in the Transition Lab in Orkney, at the International Centre for Islands Technology (ICIT) campus in Stromness.

The wind-dominated grid in Scotland necessarily operates differently from the last-century power grid. What will be the nature of end use behaviour in the era of intermittent wind forming the main source of electricity supply?

About the Project

This project is supported by the UKRI DISPATCH project which will approach these challenging aspects of electrification of heating as an actual opportunity for exploring synergies, interoperability, interactions and overall integration potential of different energy vectors, in order to identify the most cost-effective solutions for reshaping and redistributing energy demands. The DISPATCH project asserts that a net-zero transition in the UK should be planed and realised as a “bottom-up user-centric” approach, where scalability and flexibility are obtained through the aggregation, sharing and control of the resources of individual customers, but in such way that search for optimal solutions always starts with customers’ needs and always ends without reducing customers’ comfort levels. Accordingly, DISPATCH will consider socio-economic and socio-behavioural aspects as the very foundation on which decarbonisation process in residential sector should be planned and realised. The control and aggregation will start from the requirements and available resources of individual customers, then it will be seamlessly extended into local energy community and, at the final stage, it will be capable of interacting with aggregators and wider network. 

This project works with partners from ReFLEX and University of Edinburgh.

This research project will use the Transition Engineering methods and tools to seek innovations to address the wicked problems of affordability, health, legacy of buildings with low energy efficiency, intermittency of renewable resources, building regulations, and high cost of storage and building retrofits.  The approach will be to work with a cohort of people including residents, builders, council, and electricity system engineers to design a renewable energy Orkney residence model using sensing data, building and energy system modelling and gamification. Each household in each location has a history and a particular ability to adapt at a given time. The ability of households to effectively utilise low carbon energy depends on a range of factors. The project objective is to identify these factors, develop ways to evaluate the factors and techno-economic models for the values and systems interrelationships of possible carbon transition developments. Carbon transition developments can be policies, regulations, financing arrangements, business models, demand response interfaces or any other innovation.

Role Description

This RA is involved with developing the data curation, building energy modelling and survey methods to elucidate the resource of demand participation in the residential sector. Electrification of heating, flexibility of demand response and extensive development of wind, solar and marine power generation using smart grids are expected to be opportunities for shifting from oil and gas heating.

Person Specification

Essential Criteria

• Candidate will have an undergraduate in software engineering or data science.
• Experience in building energy systems, renewable energy, and grid operation.

Desirable Criteria

• PhD or Masters (or anticipate an award shortly) degree in software engineering or data science.

How to Apply

Applications can be submitted up to midnight on Sunday the 24th of April 2022. 

Please must submit via the Heriot-Watt on-line recruitment system and include a CV and Cover letter describing their interest and suitability for the post. 

For informal discussions about the position please contact S.Krumdieck@hw.ac.uk. For any support with the applications please contact M.Bailey@hw.ac.uk. 

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