Energy Futures Lab showcases energy research at Imperial College London

Energy Futures Lab recently celebrated the wide range of research at the College with a massive showcase and lecture.

Imperial College London is one of the world’s leading energy research organisations with over 1,000 staff and students working on the problems of creating a sustainable energy future.

It can be hard to really to capture this in a single event but Energy Futures Lab recently brought together as many of the teams working on energy at their biennial energy showcase.

With more than 30 different groups on show the event attracted a large audience from across academia, government and industry.At the heart of the evening was a talk from Dr Professor Anna Korre, Co-Director of Energy Futures Lab, discussing the success stories from across Imperial but also her work on sustainable materials for use in the energy sector.

You can watch a video of Professor Korre’s talk on YouTube.

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On the evening there were demonstrations of wirelssly charged drones, the Wattown demonstrator, cutting edge solar technologies, carbon capture solutions and much much more.

The showcase was not the only energy-related event on campus that day. Earlier members of the IDLES consortium met for their inaugural annual showcase. Industry, public sector, IDLES investigators and PhD students assembled to discuss research challenges, resilience, and hear about the latest programme developments.

As part of the day’s activities IDLES Researcher Co-Investigator Dr Marko Aunedi presented his work on the cost implications of transitioning to a zero carbon power system in the 2035-2050 time horizon. The system configurations and costs for a variety of low and zero emissions targets were discussed, as well as addressing how high a proportion of renewable energy sources can reasonably be integrated.

Marko said “The IDLES Showcase was a great opportunity to present some of the preliminary findings from my work to our industry and public sectors partners. These type of occasions are key for sharing our work with the programme partners and seeking their feedback; ensuring what we’re doing is valuable to stakeholders and answering questions of relevance and interest to the sector.”

Ben Harrington, from energy technology company Ecocentric, added “It was great to attend the IDLES presentation event today. It’s always interesting to hear the various updates around the projects being conducted and additionally to have the opportunity interact with other companies involved with the IDLES programme. At Ecocentric we look forward to being involved further and adding our own capabilities on data acquisition and analysis into the programme."