We’re working along with the College of Salford to create the ‘power home’ of the longer term. The lab will include 4 fully-constructed Victorian homes, connected with leading edge good tech, from photo voltaic panels to good automotive chargers, and can be able to simulating a staggering array of climate situations, from scorching 40 diploma solar to actual snowfall. Power Home 2 would be the largest and most superior lab of its variety wherever on the earth, permitting researchers and innovators like us to steam forward with essential experiments that can outline tomorrow’s greener, smarter houses.
Decarbonisation, decarbonisation, decarbonisation
The best way we generate and devour power is altering, and it’s altering quick. With electrical automobiles and electrical heating on the rise, and an increasing number of individuals working from dwelling, home electrical energy consumption is growing quickly.
So why is that this excellent news? Properly first it reveals that we’re starting to maneuver away from gasoline and soiled fossil fuels, nevertheless it additionally permits us to maneuver in direction of an all electrical power system that leverages inexperienced electrons when they’re ample; a system that makes power cheaper for everybody; a system that helps us fast-track to a internet zero world.
Transport and warmth are nonetheless among the many largest carbon emitting sectors. To decarbonise these sectors quick sufficient to cease local weather change, we have to undertake clear power applied sciences comparable to EVs and warmth pumps and transfer to a sensible grid rapidly.
The place will we slot in?
Octopus Power is main this alteration. We’re constantly creating new options to drive the inexperienced power revolution in our houses and on our streets. On this journey we frequently be part of forces with like-minded organisations to convey collectively the easiest of their fields and speed up the event and adoption of revolutionary applied sciences that can assist to sort out local weather change.
Introducing Power Home 2.0
Amongst these companions is the College of Salford, probably the most forward-thinking analysis establishments within the UK and residential to the brains behind the world’s first all-weather management dwelling power analysis lab – Power Home 2.0.
Power Home 2.0 is a £16 million check laboratory by which a workforce of power and surroundings consultants from the College of Salford is attempting to work out what low-carbon, reasonably priced houses will seem like sooner or later.
The analysis facility will home two furnished houses inside two big chambers. A state-of-the-art heating, ventilating and air con system will then permit scientists to create several types of climate inside the chambers – whether or not that’s snow, rain, wind or sunshine. Temperatures could be dropped to a frosty -20°C or raised to a balmy 40°C, which means environmental situations skilled by 95 per cent of the world’s inhabitants could be replicated.
Power Home 2.0 can be a serious analysis facility within the UK and the one one among its variety on the earth. So we’re extremely excited to be one of many major companions of this mission.
Octopus Power will provide the lab with our fabulous 100% inexperienced electrical energy. Our future-technologies consultants can even equip the 4 homes with Octopus’s ground-breaking time-of-use tariffs and cutting-edge good {hardware}, together with good meters, in-home shows, photo voltaic panels, warmth pumps, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) options (which permit clients to retailer greener power of their automotive’s battery after which promote that energy again to the grid when demand is excessive and grid power is extra carbon intensive).
There isn’t any doubt – Power Home 2.0 will form the houses of the longer term. It’s a really distinctive analysis facility that can convey the UK to internet carbon zero faster and assist alleviate gas poverty on the identical time.
Building has now begun at Power Home 2.0. The official opening of the analysis lab is scheduled for March 2022, so keep tuned.
