Universities, due to their sizeable estates and populations of staff and students, as well as their connections with, and impact within, their local and wider communities, have significant environmental, social and economic impacts. There is a strong movement for universities to become leaders in driving society towards a more sustainable future, through improving the sustainability of the built environment and the universities’ practices and operations, and through their educational, research and wider community engagement missions. Around the globe the concept of ‘Living Labs’ has emerged as an instrument to integrate these different aspects to deliver sustainability improvements, through engaging multiple stakeholders in all of these areas, and through the co-creation of projects to improve the sustainability of the campus environment and operations, and to link these to the education, research, and wider community missions of the institution. This chapter describes a living, shared framework and methodology, the ‘Campus as Living Lab’ learning system, created through global participatory workshops and Living Lab literature, aimed at supporting universities and their Sustainability (Coordinating) Offices in the development and monitoring of Living Lab projects. The framework includes seven categories of supportive data collection and three levels of details to meet different requirements of potential users. The Living Lab framework presented in this chapter, aims to create value and help universities maximise the benefit of Living Lab projects within an institution, support monitoring, reflection and learning from projects, and facilitate communication with stakeholders, and the sharing of practices and learning between peers across the globe. As a living shared, framework and learning system, the framework will adapt and develop over time and within different contexts. To provide feedback and fast (practical) learning from users, the system will be further developed to facilitate transparent peer reviewing.

The effect of disruptive technologies unrelated to the energy sector, such as additive manufacturing (AM), tends to be overlooked in energy scenarios. The present research assessed the potential effect of AM on the global energy demand in four energy scenarios for 2050 with extended versus limited globalisation and limited versus extensive adoption of AM. These scenarios were developed and applied for two cases, namely the aerospace sector and the construction sector, analysing the effect of AM on each phase in the value chain. In the aerospace sector, energy savings of 5–25% can be made, with the largest effect in the use phase because of weight reduction. In the construction sector, energy savings of 4–21% are achievable, with the largest effects in the feedstock, transport and use phases. Extrapolated to the global energy demand in 2050, a reduction of 26–138 EJ/yr, equivalent to 5–27% of global demand is achievable. It is recommended that energy policymakers should consider integrating AM and other disruptive technologies, such as robotics and the Internet of Things, into their long-term energy planning, policies and programmes, including Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The world's future energy supply will include intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind power. To guarantee reliability of supply, fast-reacting, dispatchable and renewable back-up power plants are required. One promising alternative is parked and grid-connected hydrogen-powered fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) in "Vehicle-to-Grid" systems. We modified a commercial FCEV and installed an external 9.5 kW three-phase alternating current (AC) grid connection. Our experimental verification of this set-up shows that FCEVs can be used for mobility as well as generating power when parked. Our experimental results demonstrate that present-day grid-connected FCEVs can respond to high load gradients in the range of -760 % s^-1 to + 730 % s^-1, due to the parallel connection of the high voltage battery and the fuel cell stack. Virtual power plants composed of multiple grid-connected FCEVs could perform higher power gradients than existing fast-reacting thermal power plants with typical power gradients of 1.67 % s^-1. Hydrogen consumption in 9.5 kW AC grid-connected mode was 0.55 kg h^-1, resulting in a Tank-To-Grid-AC efficiency of 43% on a higher heating value basis (51 % on a lower heating value basis). Direct current to alternating current efficiency was 95 %.

Delft University of Technology, under its "Green Village" programme, has an initiative to build a power plant (car parking lot) based on the fuel cells used in vehicles for motive power. It is a trigeneration system capable of producing electricity, heat, and hydrogen. It comprises three main zones: a hydrogen production zone, a parking zone, and a pump station zone. This study focuses mainly on the hydrogen production zone which assesses four different system designs in two different operation modes of the facility: Car as Power Plant (CaPP) mode, corresponding to the open period of the facility which uses fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) as energy and water producers while parked; and Pump mode, corresponding to the closed period which compresses the hydrogen and pumps to the vehicle's fuel tank. These system designs differ by the reforming technology: the existing catalytic reformer (CR) and a solid oxide fuel cell operating as reformer (SOFCR); and the option of integrating a carbon capture and storage (CCS).Results reveal that the SOFCR unit significantly reduces the exergy destruction resulting in an improvement of efficiency over 20% in SOFCR-based system designs compared to CR-based system designs in both operation modes. It also mitigates the reduction in system efficiency by integration of a CCS unit, achieving a value of 2% whereas, in CR-based systems, is 7-8%. The SOFCR-based system running in Pump mode achieves a trigeneration efficiency of 60%.