Earlier this month, the Decarbonising Heat Theme, supported by East Ayrshire Council, hosted a two-day residential crucible event at the Dumfries Arms Hotel and the Cumnock Town Hall.
The event brought academics, local authority and community stakeholders together to explore cross-sectoral research opportunities alongside East Ayrshire Council’s decarbonisation projects in the town of Cumnock.
East Ayrshire Council has an ambitious plan to decarbonise buildings under their Community Renewable Energy (CORE) Project. The council are excited to have contributions from academics to enhance their demonstrator projects and maximise the outcomes for replication elsewhere in Scotland and the rest of the UK.
This ambitious crucible was designed to foster focused collaboration with professional grant writers on-hand to support the development of co-created research ideas. It combined workshop-style activities with visits to three of the CORE project sites: an active District Heat Network with potential for expansion into further publicly and privately owned buildings, a historic building in need of retrofit, and a neighbourhood with a demanding mix of building archetypes and retrofit needs. Organisers welcomed local residents to join the site visits which gave participants the opportunity to consider multiple strands of the complex social-technical problem that decarbonisation presents.
The two intensive days were described as a “wonderful format to share knowledge between academics and non-academics”. Several new research ideas are being developed for further funding with East Ayrshire Council’s CORE demonstrator projects. The Alliance will support as many of these as possible to full proposals.
A larger-scale crucible is in planning – watch this page for more information to come!
Discover the Decarbonising Heat theme here.
