Phil Grünewald (FICE) is interested in energy-use from a technical, social, environmental and general curiosity perspective. He developed various tools to understand what we use energy for and how energy-use might change or be changed for the better (that is better for people and the planet).

Phil is the Oxford PI and Research Director of the Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory EDOL, based in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.

He is a Fellow of Oriel College, where he tutors Engineering Science and is a member of the Oriel Environmental Group.

In 2021 he became an Oxford Martin Fellow and led the research of Reconfiguring Energy Needs, Equity and Wellbeing ReNEW.

From 2015--2021 Phil held an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship and was PI of Measuring and Evaluating Time- and Energy-use Relationships METER. This project pioneered novel data collection methods combining proprietary electricity recorders and mobile apps to gather activity diary data from UK households, which form the basis for his current work on energy use.

Phil’s group also developed machine learning approaches to disaggregate and attribute energy use to activity patterns and appliances.

In 2016 he became a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers by presidential appointment. He has held advisory roles for BEIS and the Carbon Trust, has given evidence to the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, and has previously won the RWE/nPower Energy Challenge.

Phil holds a degree in Business-Engineering from the University of Applied Science in Wedel, Germany (1999), an MSc in Sustainable Energy Futures from Imperial College London (2009), where he also completed his PhD in Energy Research (2013) on the role of storage in low carbon energy systems, with an interdisciplinary studentship from the UK Energy Research Centre.

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