Welcome to Visions of Urban Heat Systems
Welcome to Visions of Urban Heat Systems
Visions of Urban Heat Systems is producing frameworks, tools and models to answer fundamental questions in order to inform long-term energy planning with the goal of promoting effective, informed, forward-looking decision-making among city stakeholders and ultimately aiding a radical transformation of our urban heat systems. The methods and tools developed in this research will be applied to two case-study cities, one in the UK and one in India, in order to co-produce visions of future urban energy systems.
News
Shared Ground Loops Could Fill Key Gap in UK Heat Decarbonisation, Study Finds
A new study co-authored by Frin Bale from the Visions of Urban Heat Systems team has identified shared ground loop (SGL) heating systems as a promising but underused technology that could help decarbonise heating in thousands of UK homes, particularly in areas where conventional heat pumps and large district heating networks are not practical. Published...
New presentation - Beyond homes: Agent-Based Modelling of Energy Use of Slum dwellers
Yulan Sheng, Research Fellow presented at the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) Conference on the 25-29th August 2025. The ESSA 2025 Conference's special theme was “Social simulation in a socio-technical context: embracing societies’ complexities”. Yulan's presentation was titled: Beyond homes: Agent-Based Modelling of Energy Use of Slum dwellers and was co-authored by Sumedha Basu and Frin Bale. Abstract: Climate...
New journal article - Learning from other cities: Transfer learning based multimodal residential energy prediction for cities with limited existing data
A groundbreaking study by lead author Yulan Sheng, Research Fellow in Urban Heat Systems has unveiled a powerful new method for predicting residential energy consumption, combining multimodal neural networks with transfer learning to overcome data limitations. By integrating both tabular and visual data, the model significantly outperformed traditional approaches in case studies across Barnsley, Doncaster,...