Students demonstrate carbon footprint project at House of Lords

Undergraduates from the department showcased their project work at the House of Lords yesterday, as part of a launch event for a tool that predicts the cleanliness of the electricity supply.

The tool’s developers – National Grid, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Europe and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) – held the event to promote their new regional carbon intensity calculation API.

The event also showcased new approaches to de-carbonising the electricity grid, with the Oxford student team invited to demonstrate its second-year Computer Science Group Design Practical work, which National Grid had sponsored. The undergraduates have built a web-based system to allow consumers to optimise and schedule significant electrical loads (such as electric vehicle charging) to minimise their carbon footprint.

Denitsa Markova, Alexandru Strimbu and Tiffany Duneau gave the demonstration in London. The other Design Practical team members were Zihang Lai, Zhenxian Yang and Jan Bialas.

They were accompanied to London by Professor Alex Rogers from the Department of Computer Science, who has helped verify the methodology of the partner’s API tool, and who maintains GridCarbon - a smartphone app that presents live carbon intensity information about the UK electricity grid - www.gridcarbon.uk.

Photograph (from left): Denitsa Markova, Alexandru Strimbu, and Tiffany Duneau.