As a Research Associate at the South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, I worked on Work Package 1.1: a regional retrofit optimisation platform (PI and co-PI: Professor Danielle Densley Tingley and Dr Hadi Arbabi) designed to support a fair and sustainable net-zero transition across the region.
The work fed into journal papers (some still under review) and regional policy notes published through SYSC. Looking back, though, what I actually carry forward isn’t any single output; it’s a set of practical methods I now use on every project.
Graphic produced by the South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre team.
Reusable whole-building thermal modelling framework. A big part of this work was building models that could be reused rather than thrown away after one project. I built whole-building thermal models in EnergyPlus and DesignBuilder for South Yorkshire’s varied housing stock, following SAP/RdSAP and Approved Document guidance, and I split passive performance from active performance using free-running and controlled simulations. No single model mattered as much as the underlying approach; it’s flexible enough to drop into a completely different housing context.
Designing for people, not just energy bills. Overheating, ventilation, humidity, occupant wellbeing – working across CIBSE TM52/TM59, Passivhaus, the combined heat-humidity index, Approved Document O, and EN 16798-1 taught me these aren’t separate boxes to tick. They’re one interconnected system. I don’t sign off on a retrofit strategy anymore unless it makes life better for the people inside the building, not just the number on their energy bill.
Designing for climate uncertainty. Climate uncertainty was its own problem; for instance, using probabilistic weather data from PROMETHEUS and NMBU’s Building Physics Group, I tested designs against a range of possible futures instead of betting on one projection, then translated the results into degree-hours and solar resource, metrics a non-technical stakeholder could actually use.
Establishing a defensible regional baseline. WP 1.1’s hardest problem was building a regional baseline people would actually trust. I reconciled conflicting GIS data from Verisk, EPC records, and RdSAP into a single defensible archetype classification, scaled from individual homes up to hundreds of thousands of properties across South Yorkshire. The raw data wasn’t the hard part. Getting a handful of archetypes to speak credibly for an entire regional housing stock was the hard part, and that reconciliation work fed directly into regional carbon budget studies.
Decision-focused whole-life carbon assessment. For carbon evidence, I kept embodied carbon (A1–C4) separate from operational carbon and tested payback periods against material costs and grid decarbonisation pathways. I’ve stopped handing over a single headline figure. Now I start every whole-life carbon assessment by asking what decision it actually needs to support, then build the evidence around that.
Localisation of national carbon budgets. Local authorities have a national target and no clear path for a retrofit carbon budget. To close that gap, I designed a framework that breaks down national carbon budgets from the CCC and Tyndall Centre to city and regional level, a repeatable way to turn a net-zero target into something a place can actually act on.
Embracing uncertainty. Comparing fabric-only, systems-only, and whole-house retrofit routes under different deployment rates and behavioural assumptions killed off any belief I had in a single “correct” pathway. If someone hands me an answer that sounds too certain, my instinct now is to run a sensitivity analysis and show the real range.
Cross-border retrofit standards. Benchmarking PAS 2035, EnerPhit, Approved Document L, and various European fabric standards against each other sharpened something specific: which regulatory features actually transfer across borders, and which are just local artefacts.
Tailoring Data Visualisation for Decision-Makers. The last piece was visualisation. Building multi-panel figures for academic and regional-authority audiences from the same dataset made it obvious that the reader determines the chart, not the data. So the first question on any new project is who’s actually making the decision; everything else follows from that.
Bridging technical modelling and policy delivery. Writing policy notes for local authorities and coordinating across the project team put me right between technical modelling and policy advice. I learned where you can simplify and where rigour can’t bend. WP 1.1’s real result was proving that archetype-level rigour holds up at regional scale, and that’s the standard I bring to every net-zero project since.
Leave a Reply