Smarter Green Energy Transition podcast with our Smart Energy Systems Director

Low Carbon Hub’s Smart Energy Systems Director Mairi Brookes recently appeared on the Smarter Grid Solutions podcast “Smart Grid Energy Transition”.

Not only do we discover what launched Mairi’s career in energy and working towards climate solutions (for which we at the Hub are very grateful), we also hear her views on our extensive innovation programme: Project LEO (Local Energy Oxfordshire).

Talking about Project LEO, Mairi highlights the sheer amount of learning involved in a project like this. With ten partners working across industry, communities, academia and local authorities, the project gathers a vast amount of data and knowledge. There is, of course, the technical stuff about creating these smart local energy systems. But there’s also creating solutions that are socially and commercially desirable. We need to find out what solutions people, communities and businesses want and how we work towards those. 

The conversation covers what’s essential to bear in mind as we work towards decarbonisation goals and how important it is to be well networked and embedded in place and community to get the right people and organisations working together to get things done.

For us at the Low Carbon Hub, this is absolutely at the core of what we do, and we’re happy to see this approach becoming more mainstream.

In Oxfordshire, we have a lot of this networked social infrastructure in place, and this is one of the reasons Project LEO is happening here. It takes time to build but is a hugely valuable thing to develop as we seek to meet our decarbonisation targets across the UK.