My Research
✍🏻 What my research is about
I research energy policy at Imperial College London's Centre for Environmental Policy, where my PhD examines one of the hardest problems in the energy transition: how we decarbonise heat for homes. My work is deliberately interdisciplinary — trained in law, energy economics and environmental policy, I study the transition not as a purely technical challenge, but as a question of institutions, justice, and the everyday decisions of the people who must live through it.
Three Themes
1
Justice
Who pays for the transition, who benefits from it, and who gets left behind? From my Master's thesis on energy justice and the EU's policy trilemma to my current work on the distributional politics of heat, I treat justice not as an afterthought to decarbonisation but as a condition of its success.
2
Energy Decisions in Cities
The energy transition is, above all, an urban transition — heat networks, building stock, density and infrastructure make cities both the hardest and the most promising places to decarbonise. My research engages with how cities transition: from community-based governance of urban heat networks to the institutional capacity municipalities need to lead, connecting my published work on Denmark's cities with my engagement with urban networks like C40.
3
Implementation
Policy frameworks succeed or fail in the real world. Having worked inside the European Commission — contributing to the Energy Communities Action Plan and to projects empowering energy communities across the EU — I research with implementation in mind: what it takes for a framework to survive contact with budgets, institutions, supply chains and households, and why so many well-designed policies stall between paper and practice.
🖥️ In Focus
The UK's heat transition
Heating is where the energy transition enters people's homes — and where it is proving most difficult. My doctoral research, funded by the Onassis Foundation and UKRI through the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP, asks why the UK's heat transition is proving so expensive, so political and so exclusive, and what policy frameworks could change that.
The research examines how policy can enable heat decarbonisation at scale in cities and urban environments — from district heating and heat networks to the governance models that let municipalities and communities take ownership of their own transition.
It draws heavily on comparative insight, particularly from Denmark, whose decades of experience in community-based heat governance hold transferable lessons for the UK, and it builds on my earlier work on energy communities in the EU, developed during my Master's research and my time at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Energy.
1 / Publications
Sampson, E., Makuch, Z. Lessons from Denmark for community-based governance of urban heat networks. Discov Cities 3, 105 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00273-5
Further publications from my doctoral research are in development — this page will grow.
2 / Conference Presentations
2026 — IAEE 19th European Conference, Munich. Too Expensive, Political and Exclusive: Stakeholder Perspectives on the UK's Heat Transition.
2026 — Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference, London. Too Expensive, Political and Exclusive: Stakeholder Perspectives on the UK's Heat Transition.
2025 — Urban Futures Symposium, Empa, Zurich. Socio-Technical and Policy Lessons from Denmark's Heat Transition Framework: A Rapid Evidence Review.
2025 — Hellenic Association for Energy Economics, 10th Energy Transition Symposium, Athens. Decentralised District Heating in the EU: Evaluating the Paradox and Proposing a Framework for Energy Community Expansion. (with Z. Makuch)