The Open University was founded back in 1969 and set up its Walton Hall campus amongst green fields in the new town (now city) of Milton Keynes, about 50 miles North West of London. This was a golden opportunity to influence the design of the thousands of new houses that were being built, making them far more energy-efficient. At that time, the idea of insulating UK houses at all was only just creeping into the official Building Regulations.
This is the fascinating story of the pioneering work of Professor Peter (Jake) Chapman, a physicist, at The Open University (OU) and John Doggart, an architect, at the new Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC). This work was carried out firmly encouraged by the MKDC management.
Jake had become very concerned about UK energy policy. This was a time when North Sea oil and gas were coming on stream and there was a rose-tinted optimism about the future of nuclear power. How about just using less energy? He set out his views in his 1975 book ‘Fuels Paradise’.
At the OU Jake set up an Energy Research Group (ERG), mainly consisting of new PhD students. Through the 1970s and 1980s Jake and members of ERG worked with MKDC on a range of projects, such as:
- Analysing the performance of an active solar house (with thermal solar panels)
- Helping design and monitor nearly 200 low energy passive solar houses (where the solar gains come in through south-facing windows)
- Developing an energy rating system for new houses (the foundation of modern UK home Energy Performance Certificates).
The tests on the passive solar houses showed that they were so successful and cost-effective that MKDC introduced its own building regulations for all of the city’s new houses. They had to be insulated to standards that wouldn’t be matched in the UK national regulations until after 2000.
And bear in mind that the computer power of the period was very primitive. Home computers and spreadsheets were only just being invented!
Discover more about the project in the video below.
A vital element of the story is the genuine spirit of collaboration between academia and the architects of Milton Keynes Development Corporation. The new enthusiasm for energy-efficiency was communicated to prospective private house developers in two major exhibitions of low energy designs: HomeWorld (1981) and Energy World (1986).
I remember very fondly how a new intellectual door opened for me when I first read a copy of Jake’s best-selling Penguin book Fuel’s Paradise during my PhD research at the Cambridge Energy Research Group. In one way or another this new language of energy analysis has defined my career and life-long interests in energy teaching, energy efficiency and conservation.
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