Energy

The group is developing tools to support interactive top down analysis and visualisation of energy, material and natural resource systems.

These tools are available to researchers, as well as strategic thinkers in industry and government. They enable users to anticipate how our exploitation of resources may create environmental stress, including interactions between energy, land, water, bulk and critical material systems, at different geographical scales.

Forecasting future human demands is difficult, so instead our work aims to identify how different approaches to resource will influence future resource stress. Our main activities in this area are:

• Foreseer: developing an online tool to visualise coupled resource stresses
• WholeSEM: we are part of a consortium of universities developing methods to analyse alternative future energy systems in the UK
• Specific resource systems: we have developed analyses at global and national scale of the flows of energy, greenhouse gas emissions, the bulk and critical metals, water and biomass.