Anthony Schoofs, a PhD researcher at CLARITY in UCD, has been awarded the Globe Sustainability Research Award 2011 in recognition of his contribution to sustainability research.
Schoofs’ winning project is part of his PhD research at CLARITY, the Centre for Sensor Web Technologies at UCD. His overall research is focused on appliance load monitoring systems for commercial and office buildings.
He will be presented with the award for his research at the Globe Forum Stockholm 2011 this May, which will focus on existing and upcoming business opportunities in creating sustainable cities. It will look into how businesses can manage natural capital – renewable resources, biodiversity and ecosystem services – with the same diligence as financial capital.
The Globe Forum jury said he had shown that the power contribution of individual appliances can be extracted from a building’s power load captured with a single meter, via intelligent pattern recognition technique, or via combination with other sources of information, such as machines’ activity onto local area networks indicating power consumers at a given time.
Schoofs’ work has been implemented and tested into multiple pilot sites, ranging from hotels to hospitals, and is in the process of commercialisation.
The jury, which was chaired by Mohan Munasinghe, professor of sustainable development at University of Manchester, said Schoofs’ research has demonstrated clear gains in all three dimensions of sustainable development – economic, social and environmental.
“The work is both original and practical. I am especially pleased that it is an excellent application of the Sustainomicsframework, showing how individuals and companies can and must act now, to make development more sustainable,” said Munasinghe, who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace, as vice-chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
