Successful EU bid for Prof Mike McEvoy

Prof Mike McEvoy is the UK lead on an Anglo-French consortium that has just won 6,283,301 euros for their EU Interreg Project 'IFORE' (Innovation for Renewal). The University of Brighton is coordinating IFORE, and the other project partners are the Université d’Artois, and two housing associations: Amicus Horizon in England and Pas-de-Calais Habitat in France. 

The public housing stock in both Kent and Calais includes a large number of older properties that are in need of improvement.  Apart from insulation, two crucial questions arise when upgrading dwellings to eco-construction standards: first, how can the construction be made air-tight (which makes adequate ventilation a necessity)?  Second, how should renewable energy sources be introduced, in order to satisfy targets for carbon emissions reduction? This project will identify optimal performance and payback times for ventilation and renewable energy solutions for selected housing stock on both sides of the Channel.

The housing professionals and university teams will identify a sample of equivalent house types in Kent and Pas-de-Calais and survey them for air-tightness and heat loss.  From this data, computer simulation models of the dwellings will be built by the university researchers. The model predictions will identify the 3 or 4 best options for upgrading 200 selected dwellings, 100 in each country. The buildings will be retrofitted and monitored to measure their relative energy consumption before and after the interventions, and the results will be used by the academic partners to determine the relative success of each of the approaches. In line with the increasing attention being given to the user, the study will also investigate the tenants’ interaction with the technologies and the upgrading process. 

This large scale study will pave the way for the introduction, and industrialisation, of very low carbon residential retrofitting solutions, and after the project's completion, will guide the future retrofit of 10,000 out the 66,000 homes controlled by both housing associations.