Suchergebnisse

Lack of standardized sustainable habitat design guidelines for low-income housing plays an important role in determining the poor quality of life in these settlements, particularly in the slums. My work investigates process-driven pathways for developing and delivering sustainable habitat design guidelines using socio-technical frameworks. I employ mixed-mode research methods to understand low-income habitat from the perspective of people, places and practices. I combine urban experimentation with robust simulation techniques to derive practical solutions for improving the quality of life (QoL) of the urban poor. Urban experimentation includes data acquisition through in-situ environmental sensing of the low-income habitations, modelling of the houses, calibration of the sensed data, and its urban scale building energy calculations using state-of-the-art building energy simulation techniques. I integrate the socio-cultural stochastics in the building simulation framework to derive empirical evidence of the urban QoL in these settlements. There are three cohorts of my research: 1) Investigation of building performance; 2) Spatial analytics for urban sustainability and policy analysis; 3) Data-driven simulation and modelling techniques for derivation of low-income sustainability heuristics. ; Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India

© 2016 The Authors. Daylight is an important element of energy efficient buildings. Energy savings from artificial lighting during the daytime can have significant impact on the energy sustainability residential buildings. For a city like Mumbai, where the buildings have limited access to daylight due to the sprawling of densely packed high rise buildings, energy saving from daylighting can be an effective driver of sustainability. Under this purview, it is prudent to evaluate the effects of various building design elements like orientation and window-to-wall ratio (WWR) on energy saving potential through daylighting. In this study, two parameters of daylight incidences: Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) and annual light exposure, were studied to understand the daylight performance of a high rise residential building. UDI values were then reiterated by varying the orientation and WWR. The results showed that the building performed best at the South-East orientation with a WWR of 50% which allowed 63% more ambient illuminance in the functional space. This study also unveils the paradigm that ambient illuminance inside the functional space of the building may be independent of total incident annual light exposure in the rooms. That means more annual exposure does not necessarily means better lighting conditions within the indoor functional space. Hence, this study creates a way forward in designing energy efficient buildings using UDI as a daylight performance metric. ; Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India under the Grant number- 14MHRD005.

About 70% of India's current energy mix comprises of coal, and the increase in generation from renewable (RE) sources is affecting the health of the power system. We investigated this effect through the lens of asset utilisation, cost and the social disruption caused by accelerating RE into the Indian Power System. Our review-driven analysis revealed that increasing RE generation is pushing the coal plants to operate in low-loading conditions, causing heightened wear and tear of the plant as they are not suitable for flexible operation. The novel analysis of social disruption due to market parity between RE and coal-based generation presented a holistic view of the political economy of Indian Power System. We found that transition from coal to RE may have extended socio-political ramifications that can potentially disrupt the national economy at an unprecedented scale. Policy implications outlined by our study for the draft Electricity (Amendment) Bill 2020 include scoping a socio-technical framework which supports just energy transition through better financial support mechanisms for flexible operation of coal plants. Focusing on clean-up over shut-down of coal plants and facilitating investments in battery storage technologies and cross-border electricity trade as RE and conventional fuel reach market parity. ; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [OPP1144] and Energy Transition Small Grant by Isaac Newton Trust

India's Intended Nationally Determined Contributions in 2015 toward the Two‐Degree Celsius climate change goal has endorsed 15% of renewable integration in the primary energy mix by 2020. The energy space is strategy to meet the target without affecting its immediate sustainable development goals. This study documents this strategic effort by tracking the historical trajectory of energy policy planning since its independence in 1947. An objective ontological approach was adopted in reviewing the evolution of energy policy into five distinct phases. Phase I (1947–1970), focused on supply adequacy with the overall thrust on infrastructure development as the pillar of Indian economy. In Phase II (the 1970s) the focus shifted in addressing the energy access crisis. Phase III (the 1980s) was based on increment, diversification, and streamlining on supplies for energy security purposes. Phase IV (the 1990s) is the period of modernization of the overall Indian electricity system. Phase V (the 2000s) is the present phase of market transformation and climate change mitigation energy policies. A co‐assessment of India's policy to the international climate negotiations showed that India remained responsive to international climate goals. It became reactive in the planning for sustainable energy policy after its ratification of Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Since then, India has been instrumental in administering strict emission reduction norms and efficiency measures. This review concludes that the country needs to upgrade its inefficient transmission and distribution networks, which was broadly neglected. The subsidy allocations in domestic energy resources should be well‐adjusted without compromising on its social costs.

This study explores the effect of slum rehabilitation on appliance ownership and its implications on residential electricity demand. The low-income scenario makes it unique because the entire proposition is based on the importance of non-income drivers of appliance ownership that includes effects of changing the built environment (BE), household practices (HP) and appliances characteristics (AC). This study demonstrates quantitatively that non-income factors around energy practices influence appliance ownership, and therefore electricity consumption. The methodology consists of questionnaire design across the dimension of BE, HP and AC based on social practice theory, surveying of 1224 households and empirical analysis using covariance-based structural equation modelling. Results show that higher appliance ownership in the slum rehabilitation housing is due to change in household practice, built environment and affordability criteria of the appliances. Change in HP shifts necessary activities like cooking, washing and cleaning from outdoor to indoor spaces that positively and significantly influences higher appliance ownership. Poor BE conditions about indoor air quality, thermal comfort and hygiene; and product cost, discounts and ease of use of the appliances also triggers higher appliance ownership. The findings of this study can aid in designing better regulatory and energy efficiency policies for low-income settlements. ; RD is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grant no. OPP1144) through the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship. This study is in parts funded by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India (Grant no. 14MHRD005) under the Frontier Areas in Science and Technology grant awarded to RB.

Slum rehabilitation policies in India is observed to have a rebound effect on the occupants, where rehabilitated occupants move back to the horizontal slums. In this study, we investigate the cause behind this rebound phenomenon based on a theory of homeostasis, where the loss of homeostasis refers to occupants' heightened discomfort and distress in their built environment. A novel methodological framework was developed to investigate it based on the principles of participatory backcasting approach and the theory of homeostasis. Thirty households in Mumbai's slum rehabilitation housing were interviewed to determine the social, economic and environmental cause of distress and discomfort. Granular information was obtained by further investigating the factors that influence occupants' attitude, emotions, health, control and habits in their built environment that regulates their holistic comfort and lack of stress. The causal linkages among these factors were established using a qualitative fault tree. Results show two primary cause of distress and discomfort in the study area owing to economic distress and built environment related discomfort. Economic distress was from low-income and high electricity bills due to higher household appliance ownership, and built environment discomfort was due to lack of social spaces and poor design of the slum rehabilitation housing. This study showed that mitigating such non-income drivers of distress and discomfort can prevent rebound phenomenon and improve the sustainability of the slum rehabilitation process. ; RD would like to thank the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Cambridge Trust for support through the Commonwealth Shared Scholarship 2017-18 (INSS-2017-339) and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for support through the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship 2018-21 (OPP1144). RB would like to thank Charles Wallace India Trust for supporting her as a CWIT Fellow- 2018 at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Part of this study is supported by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India project 'FAST' (Grant No. 14MHRD005) and IRCC-IIT Bombay Fund (Grant No. 16IRCC561015) and the British Academy Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research Projects titled 'Gender and household energy: female participation in designing domestic energy in India's slum rehabilitation housing' (Grant No. KF1\100033). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding bodies and supporting organisations.

Many governments have begun to adopt aggressive targets for electric vehicles. However, studies of the drivers of electric vehicle (EV) adoption are scarce. Social media interactions can provide a new data-driven vantage point to explore such drivers. This study uses data from 36,000 public posts on Facebook to investigate intersectionality in EV-communication as per the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental (PESTLE) categories. A computational social science methodology was adopted using a mixed-method application of social network analysis and machine learning-based topic modelling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm on a 600,000-text corpus extracted from the Facebook posts. Results showed that political, economic, and legal posts had dense clusters around the technology policy of EV, the institutional discourse of electrification of the federal vehicle fleet, and tax and credit framework politics. The environmental and social dimensions had a higher discourse for social justice, clean air, and better health and well-being. A market shift towards EV as a service industry was observed in the technology and economics-related posts. These findings can help policymakers, and planners design contextualised energy policy for influencing EV adoption in the U.S. and other countries. ; This study is in parts supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under the grant number [OPP1144] through the Gates Cambridge Scholarship; Energy Transition Small Grant 2020 by the Isaac Newton Trust; and the Winter Fellowship – 2020 by the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum (MiCEF), awarded to RD at the University of Cambridge.