Energy

Understanding the urban environment and its effect on indoor air.

Hannah GoughLeave a comment

Email: h.l.gough@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Recent estimates by the United Nations (2009) state that 50 to 70 % of the world’s population now live in urban areas with over 70 % of our time being spent indoors, whether that’s at work, at home or commuting.

We’ve all experienced a poor indoor environment, whether it’s the stuffy office that makes you sleepy, or the air conditioning unit that causes the one person under it to freeze. Poor environments make you unproductive and research is beginning to suggest that they can make you ill. The thing is, the microclimate around one person is complex enough, but then you have to consider the air flow of the room, the ventilation of the building and the effect of the urban environment on the building.

So what tends to happen is that buildings and urban areas are simplified down into basic shapes with all the fine details neglected and this is either modelled at a smaller scale in a wind tunnel or by using CFD (computer fluid dynamics). However, how do we know whether these models are representative of the real-world?

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This is Straw city, which was built in Silsoe U.K during 2014. You can just see the car behind the array (purple circle), these cubes of straw are 6 m tall, or roughly the height of an average house. Straw city is the stepping stone between the scale models and the real world, and was an urban experiment in a rural environment. We measured inside the array, outside of the array and within the blue building so we could see the link between internal and external flow: which meant the use of drones and smoke machines! The focus of the experiment was on the link between ventilation and the external conditions.

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Smoke releases, drone flying, thermal imaging and tracer gas release: some of the more fun aspects of the fieldwork

After 6 months of data collection, we took the straw cubes away and just monitored the blue cube on its own and the effect of the array can clearly be seen in this plot, where pink is the array, and blue is the isolated cube. So this is showing the pressure coefficient (Cp),  and can be thought of as a way of comparing one building to another in completely different conditions. You can see that the wind direction has an effect and that the array reduces the pressure felt by the cube by 60-90 %. Pressure is linked to the natural ventilation of a building: less pressure means less flow through the opening.

 

Alongside the big straw city, we also went to the Enflo lab at the University of Surrey to run some wind tunnel experiments of our own, which allowed us to expand the array.

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Photos of the wind tunnel arrays. Left is the biggest array modelled, centre is the Silsoe array, top right is the wind tunnel and roughness elements. Bottom right is the model of the storage shed at the full-scale site and centre is the logging system used.

So we have a data set that encompasses all wind directions and speeds, all atmospheric stabilities, different temperature differences and different weather conditions. It’s a big data set and will take a while to work through, especially with comparisons to the wind tunnel model and CFD model created by the University of Leeds. We will also compare the results to the existing guidelines out there and to other similar data sets.

I could ramble on for hours about the work, having spent far too long in a muddy field in all weathers but for more information please email me or come along to my departmental seminar on the 8th November.

This PhD project is jointly funded by the University of Reading and the EPSRC and is part of the Refresh project: www.refresh-project.org.uk

The impact of Climate Variability on the GB power system.

Hannah BloomfieldLeave a comment

Email: h.bloomfield@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Bloomfield et al., 2016. Quantifying the increasing sensitivity of power systems to climate variability. View published paper.

Within the power system of Great Britain (GB), there is a rapidly increasing amount of generation from renewables, such as wind and solar power which are weather-dependent. An increased proportion of weather-dependent generation will require increased understanding of the impact of climate variability on the power system.

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Figure 1: Predicted installed capacity from the National Grid Gone Green Scenario. Source: National Grid Future Energy Scenarios (2015).

Current research on the impact of climate variability on the GB power system is ongoing by climate scientists and power system modellers. The focus of the climate research is on the weather-driven components of the power system, such as the impact of climate variability on wind power generation. These studies tend to include limited knowledge of the whole system impacts of climate variability. The research by power system modellers focuses on the accurate representation of the GB power system. A limited amount of weather data may be used in this type of study (usually 1-10 years) due to the complexity of the power system models.

The aim of this project is to bridge the gap between these two groups of research, by understanding the impact of climate variability on the whole GB power system.In this project, multi-decadal records from the MERRA reanalysis* are combined with a simple representation of the GB power system, of which the weather-dependent components are electricity demand and wind power production. Multiple scenarios are analysed for GB power systems, including 0GW, 15GW, 30GW, and 45GW of installed wind power capacity in the system.

This study characterises the impact of inter-annual climate variability on multiple aspects of the GB power system (including coal, gas and nuclear generation) using a load duration curve framework. A load duration curve can be thought of as a cumulative frequency distribution of power system load. Load can be either power system demand (i.e. the NO-WIND scenario) or demand minus wind power (ie. the LOW, MED and HIGH scenarios).

The introduction of additional wind-power capacity greatly increases the year-year variability in operating opportunity for conventional generators, this is particularly evident for baseload plant (i.e. nuclear power plants). The impact of inter-annual climate variations across the power system due to present-day level of wind-farm installation has approximately doubled the exposure of the GB power sector to inter-annual climate variability. This is shown in Figure 2 as the spread between the red and blue curves (from the LOW scenario) is double that of the black curves (the NO-WIND scenario).

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Figure 2: Load duration curves for the NO-WIND and LOW scenario in black and grey respectively. The two most extreme years from the LOW scenario are 1990 and 2010, plotted in red and blue respectively. Vertical dashed lines show the percentage of time that baseload-plant (91%) and peaking plant (7%) are required to operate

This work has shown that as the amount of installed wind power capacity on the power system is increased, the total amount of energy required from other generators (coal, gas, nuclear) is reduced. Wind therefore contributes to decarbonising the power system, however the reduction is particularly pronounced for plants which are operating as baseload rather than peaking plant (i.e. oil fired generation) where an increase in required production is seen.

This study adds to the literature which suggests that the power system modelling community should begin to take a more robust approach to its treatment of weather and climate data by incorporating a wider range of climate variability.

For more information contact the author for a copy of the paper with details of this work: Quantifying the increasing sensitivity of power system to climate variability (submitted to ERL).

* A reanalysis data set is a scientific method for developing a record of how weather and climate are changing over time. In it, observations are combined with a numerical model to generate a synthesised estimate of the state of the climate system.