Share

energising the industry

Aberdeen’s two universities are at the heart of research into renewables – an industry which has the potential to help ensure the North-east’s economic prosperity for generations to come.

For the past 15 years Robert Gordon University has been involved in renewables research and last year it launched the Centre for Understanding Sustainability in Practice (CUSP) to educate and inspire people to embrace sustainable practice as part of their daily lives.

Dr Alan Owen, Director of CUSP, is also the Northern Research Partnership Chair of Renewable Energy and the lead sustainability consultant for the university’s Garthdee masterplan.

He is driving forward the renewables agenda by leading the plan to achieve the university’s target of a 42% reduction in its CO2 output in the next 10 years, in line with the Scottish Government’s target.

A significant amount of that will be achieved as a result of the consolidation of all the university’s activities at the Garthdee campus in a £170 million development ahead of that deadline.

However Dr Owen said: “A fair proportion comes from things like turning off computers and turning down the heating. These are things which are common to just about any business. People consume energy without thinking about it and what we are trying to achieve here is to explain to people that in order to save energy, to reduce CO2 output, you don’t have to have a hair shirt existence. It is a matter of being thoughtful rather than being expected to live in a cave.”

As well as reducing its own carbon footprint the university is a major player in renewables research and education.

RGU has been involved in marine renewables research since 1995, principally in tidal energy, but also in wave. It is now developing post graduate qualifications in offshore wind which are likely to be available for delivery next year. On the same timescale an MSc in sustainable energy and carbon management will be available.

“We have a broad range of research and scholarly activity in marine renewables and have been active in many different countries as well as across Scotland,” said Dr Owen.

“The Scottish Government asked us to lead up a project with Oxford and Edinburgh looking at the general renewables resource in the Maldives, where we have been working on marine renewables for some time. The Maldives Government wants to be carbon neutral by 2020. To succeed they are not only going to have to produce enough energy for their own needs but also be able to offset all of the fuel used by aircraft bringing their tourists.”

He said that while RGU had achieved global recognition for its work in wave and tidal power it was also involved in work relating to offshore wind, solar thermal and anaerobic digestion.

RGU works closely with Aberdeen University in projects complementing rather than competing.

“We are currently working on a project in the Firth of Forth with zoologists from Aberdeen University. We are interested in the effect a tidal turbine would have on the current flow and they are interested in how the current flow dictates the distribution of food particles for birds and fish – the environmental impact of tidal engineering - so that is a perfect dovetailing.”

Dr Owen said renewables were of huge importance to the university and not just because of the funding they attracted.

“We have substantial international standing based on our green energy research. It is starting to come into our teaching and I think it has to be part of the university’s undergraduate output before very long as I think it needs to be part of Aberdeen city’s industrial capability

“Aberdeen as a city deals with the oil and gas industry but essentially its expertise is really engineering in a marine context. It doesn’t matter too much whether that engineering is oil and gas related or whether it is offshore wave or wind or tidal. Aberdeen has that expertise and it needs to continue to exploit it.

“The North Sea is not going to dry up tomorrow but it is not going to be there forever. Once it starts to look like oil and gas is fading the big capability will start to leave and when it starts to leave that will become an unstoppable process.

“There has to be something here for them to make them want to stay.

Aberdeen has been a good place to do business in terms of its relative wealth and income and as long as oil and gas is doing well then Aberdeen exists in its own economic bubble.

“However it is probably not the best place from a cost point of view to have your business base. There will be cheaper parts of Scotland where you can have your business and operate than Aberdeen so the city needs to be wary and needs to be ahead of the game.

“The universities have to be committed to the city and the city has to be committed to the universities and industry has to be part of that equation. Aberdeen needs to get its long term act together.”

Professor Paul Mitchell, Head of the University of Aberdeen’s School of Resources, Environment and Society also highlighted the close working relationship between the two institutions.

“The two universities in Aberdeen have good strong links and we work together on a number of things,” he said.

“We have a joint chair working on hydrogen but also we are linked into the wider Scottish research intensive universities on energy through the Energy Technology Partnership.

“We are also working with the Scottish European Green Energy Centre (SEGEC) which is going to be doing to bigger projects and we would be able to underpin the research for those projects.

“We have a tremendous amount of energy related research at the university and a lot of it is servicing the oil and gas industry but there is an increasing amount of renewables and clean technologies.

“We have a lot of work going on in bio fuels. I work on getting the raw materials into the right place and making sure that the infrastructure and overall planning system work appropriately.

“I have colleagues in chemistry who work on the conversion processes so whether we are producing bioethanol or biodiesel we are feeding into that. We have a group of people working on catalysis – basically looking at the ways in which we can get greater energy efficiency and also hydrogen feeding into fuel cells which will obviously have implications for the transport sector.

“We also have people working on energy crops and looking at how they can be produced and, as the climate is changing as a consequence of global warming, what crops we can grow, where we can grow them and what the yields would be.”

Other projects include developing a wave device; working on high voltage direct current transmission of electricity; and investigating the environmental impact of green energy devices.

“We are also working on offshore wind and obviously have great hopes for the wind deployment centre in Aberdeen Bay because that would be a tremendous opportunity for us, Aberdeen, Scotland, Europe to have a test centre to look at all the aspects of offshore wind which would be second to none in Europe.

“It is all looking pretty good at the moment. Five years ago there was just myself and a couple of others and now there are a significant number of us working in the area and it is bringing in industry money, government money, European money and Research Council money so we are firing on all cylinders at the moment.”