Leicester's City Mayor has established the City Partnership to deliver the ambitious aim of creating a low carbon city: a city with its own power station providing both electricity and heat to homes and businesses; a city creating new jobs in energy efficiency and renewable energy; a city with energy efficient homes and businesses; a city maximising its local food potential, minimising its waste and a city that is developing low carbon transport systems. This proposal is to integrate many issues into a coordinated programme to bring efficiencies that deliver social, economic and encvironmental benefits with greater impact and lower cost. It will integrate the low carbon city objective with affordable homes, jobs, quality of life, young people, culture, and sport. The feasibility study will allow us to identify the most appropriate low carbon interventions to make on a citywide scale to help improve quality of life for those living and working in Leicester.

GoodDeeds will use digital technologies to facilitate behaviour change through engaging and empowering employees to reduce the environmental impact of public buildings. Almost 20% of the UK's energy consumption and CO2 emissions arise from non-domestic buildings. Behaviour change initiatives could have a significant impact given current estimates that around 30% of energy in buildings is currently wasted. The aim of the research then is to work with Leicester City Council to develop a set of social media/smartphone tools that the local authority can use to reduce the energy demand across its building stock. This research aims to explore the opportunities for and impact of digital technologies on user-behaviour and energy demand reduction in the non-domestic setting through enabling building users to both understand the environmental impact of their activities and to act in networks through social media applications of the digital technology. For example, social media platforms offer building-users the ability to view the energy consumption of the building and offer comment if the consumption is unexpectedly high. Photos or video can be taken and posted of any issues; knowledge can be shared on how best to manage a room's temperature; visitors can share their views and energy managers can share best practice and gain insight from building-users if their building energy management system is flagging up an alert. Importantly the research aims to explore the potential of social media tools to overcome the lack of empowerment many building-users feel in being unable to control or affect the building's energy performance. Findings from the project should increase understanding on how ICT can help society meet challenging and ambitious carbon reduction targets. Given the high energy demand and carbon footprint of the built environment there is a pressing need to implement effective and affordable energy demand reduction strategies in non-domestic buildings. The potential impact of Gooddeeds then is in finding an affordable ICT based solution for building users to collaborate, share knowledge and mitigate some of the errors inherent in the solely technical approach. This could impact on the way buildings are managed, building energy management systems are operated and how building users experience and perceive buildings. But this is not simply about buildings. Gooddeeds seeks to demonstrate that solutions to the grand challenges of our age will not be resolved by merely 'top down' solutions but by approaches that insist on the engagement and nurturing of active citizens who understand their responsibilities to their environment and to each other, and who act together for the mutual good.

The project will work with teachers, governors, pupils, building designers, researchers and policy makers in Leicester over two academic years to engage with them in the science, engineering and technology of carbon neutral schools. Leicester is the UK's first Environment City and has a long history of carrying out energy efficiency improvement work and installing renewable energy technologies. It is in the first wave of the national programme Building Schools for the Future which will refurbish all the city's 17 secondary schools in a 220 million programme. Leicester is also unique in that most of its schools have intelligent metering to read the electricity, gas and water consumption every half hour. The project will address the science, engineering and technology of energy efficiency and renewable energy in school design and operation through training courses, hands on activities, visits and a dialogue between pupils and both building energy experts and policy makers. It will focus on the schools that are being rebuilt in Leicester as part of the Building Schools for the Future initiative. There would be two main areas of engagement, firstly between the pupils and the energy experts from the project partners and secondly between pupils and policy makers from Leicester City Council and the Department for Children, Schools and Families.The pupils will experience practical energy related projects. These will include:discussions on thermal performance, ventilation, daylighting and appliance use in school buildings,visits to sustainable buildings , workshops with building energy experts, researchers and policy makers relating to their school building,multimedia presentation work and role play, building small scale renewable energy models and investigating the siting of wind turbines,computer simulation,analysing electricity gas, water and temperature data.This will stimulate teacher and pupil interest in future energy use and inspire them through hands on experience of sustainable energy projects. They will be able to explain the role of thermal insulation, daylighting, ventilation, electrical appliance use and renewable energy in buildings to both policy makers and the wider school community. The pupils will engage with young researchers, so hopefully being inspired to think about a career in science and engineering. The project will also analyse the post occupancy performance of the four low energy schools currently being built, so helping to determine whether predicted energy and water consumption reductions have been achieved. Finally the pupils will engage with the policy makers (the Leader of Leicester City Council and the other senior decision makers involved in the BSF process). This will then inform the design and operation of the new schools being built in Leicester and also inform the DCSF about the design and operation of new school buildings to maximise environmental sustainability.Evaluation is a key part of the project. On-line questionnaires will be completed by participants before, during and after the engagement. The results of these evaluations will be disseminated at BSF and other events that will take place over the next three years. It will help inform the national BSF programme development.

The Energy Data Innovation Network (EDI-Net) will use smart energy and water meter data to accelerate the implementation of sustainable energy policy. It will do this by increasing the capacity of EU public authorities to act quickly and decisively. The capacity will be increased by the provision of just the right amount of intelligible information, by training and exchange of experiences of Public authorities and by provision of tools and support to implement and monitor their sustainable energy plans. To move beyond the traditional technical energy manager approach to use the information to engage with decision makers, finance mangers and building users. To make energy more “visible”. To make energy and water date “more exciting” to buildings users. Innovation in terms of using big data analytics to address issues at scale. Big data; thousands of EU public buildings; information for decision makers, finance managers and building users; benchmarking of EU public buildings; and monitoring implementation of Sustainable Energy Action Plans or local Climate Protection Plans. The core of EDI-NET is the analysis of smart meter data from buildings, from renewable energy systems and from building energy management systems (BEMS) using Big Data analytics technologies. The attractive fruit around this core is an online forum to spread knowledge and facilitate exchange of experience and best practice through peer to peer education in a friendly and useful way. The tree that supports and ripens the fruit is the existing European network of Climate Alliance that builds the capacity of EU public authorities to more effectively implement sustainable energy policies. We recognise the smart meter data, by themselves, will not implement sustainable energy policy. However, when combined with on-line discussion forum, local campaigns, awareness raising and peer to peer knowledge transfer it can achieve savings of between 5 and 15 percent; at least 16 GWh/yr, worth over 1.5 M€.

The project will engage festival goers in the science and engineering of how they can reduce their own carbon footprint. It will do this in an environment where people are enjoying themselves, that is, at music festivals. It will work with festival organisers, event managers and science communicators using peer education, interactive displays and hand held devices to communicate the underlying science and engineering of measures to reduce personal carbon emissions. The Face Your Elephant peer education facility was devised by young people as part of the C-Change project http://www.switchonswitchoff.org/. The typical emissions of someone in the UK is equivalent to two elephants. The challenge is to reduce this value to one baby elephant - hence the title. It consists of display material and practical interactive exhibitions that engage people in actions that they can take to reduce their carbon footprint. This facility will be expanded to increase the amount of science and engineering via updated displays, hand held devices and the involvement of researchers, PhD students and Science and Engineering Ambassadors. A carbon calculator, running on hand held devices will be used to help people measure their personal carbon footprint. The key part of the exhibition is a dialogue between festival goers and the Peer Educators about energy in the home and a future low carbon economy. The hand held devices will provide audio, text, images and video to help explain the science and engineering. They will also be used to collect questionnaire and carbon footprint data, so gathering information on their knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. This proposal would update the material; develop related text, video, images for display on the hand held devices and train the peer educators. The approach will be piloted in 2009 and then used at mainstream music festivals in 2010.