Dr Lai Fong Chiu, UCL Energy Institute - Plenary Talk

Plenary Talk at AECB Annual Conference 2023: The impacts of the pandemic and energy crisis responses on health and energy systems
Dr Lai Fong Chiu, UCL Energy Institute
From a system perspective, we analyse system shocks, responses, and recovery to reveal what makes
systems either vulnerable or resilient. Using current and past quantitative and qualitative data, we investigate
responses to the COVID_19 pandemic and to the energy price crisis that began in 2019. We will show that the
health system and the energy system are not separate but are parts of wider system that sustains us. The
pandemic has not only put our biological health at risk, and the responses to it appear to have triggered a deep
economic recession, with implications for both material and human resources that could impede an energy
transition.
Lai Fong is a Principal Research Fellow at the UCL Energy Institute. She joined UCL after a long and productive research/practice career in the National Health Service and at Leeds University, UK. Her aim on joining the UCL Energy Institute was to use her experience and expertise to contribute to the establishment of a socio-technical perspective on energy demand through active participation in empirical research, teaching, and PhD supervision.
In 2010, Lai Fong led the qualitative component of a Post Occupancy Evaluation project - FLASH (Facilitation, Learning, And Sharing) - funded by the Energy Saving Trust and the Institute for Sustainability, and has been since been involved in series of Post-occupancy Evaluation projects in both residential and commercial sectors. She was co-investigator on the Institute’s first large project, PEB-D3 (EP/H051112/1), and on the £6 million EUED Centre for Energy Epidemiology (EP/K011839/1).
In 2014 Lai Fong completed a major case study project commissioned by BEIS (Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, previously DECC, now DESNEZ).
Lai Fong is currently CI on the £1.5 million EPSRC Decarbonisation of Heat Challenge, which is being undertaken within the Centre for Research on Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS: EP/R0352881). Her role is to support the application of system architecture concepts and methods to investigate how policy and governance might be integrated with system modelling of options for decarbonising heat in the UK. Lai Fong is also the PI of the HCC_19 Integrated Project funded separately by the CREDS programme. This project aims to investigate System Shocks, Response and Recovery
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