Prof Robert Lowe, UCL Energy Institute - Plenary Talk

Plenary Talk at AECB Annual Conference 2023: Energy, economy and life: scarcity, substitution and the energy system transition.
Prof Robert J Lowe, UCL Energy Institute.
This presentation will cover the relationship between energy, population and the economy, the Hubbert Curve, evidence for declining EROEI for fossil fuels, the logistic nature of energy system transitions, practical limits to energy substitutability, and the problem of negotiating multiple constraints on energy, economic and geopolitical development through the 21st Century.
Robert Lowe is a physicist with a broad interest in the field of buildings, energy and sustainability, and in the interplay between energy end-use demand systems and the whole energy system. He is the author or co-author of approaching 100 journal and conference papers, 3 books and numerous reports, spanning energy systems, economics, and energy use in buildings, and including theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions. He joined UCL as Professor of Energy and Building Science in 2006. In 2009, with Prof Tadj Oreszczyn, he established the UCL Energy Institute, which he directed from August 2014 to January 2018. He is Director of the London-Loughborough EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Energy Demand (2008-), and of its successor, the EPSRC-SFI Centre for Doctoral Training in Energy Resilience and the Built Environment (ERBE). He was the first chair of the SAP Scientific Integrity Group (2012-14). He served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Building Research & Information from 2000-2018, and on the Board of the BBA from 2014-2019. Among his many research projects, he has been co-investigator on UCL-Energy’s Centre for Energy Epidemiology, one of six EPSRC-funded Energy End-use Demand Centres, and has directed a major BEIS-funded project on the field performance of domestic heat pumps, at the time of writing, the largest such project to have taken place in Europe. Since 2018 he has led the EPSRC Decarbonisation of Heat Challenge, within the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS). A key focus of this project has been the development and application of the concept of Energy System Architecture to the problem of decarbonisation of heat and of the energy system as a whole. Since 2020 his work has also included transition dynamics and analysis of the political, economic and resource requirements for a successful energy system transition.
For more information about the AECB Annual Conference visit aecb.net/