The project will provide the UK's first 'map' of network capacity and headroom and consider case studies in different parts of the UK in detail. It will also assess how heat and cooling demand might change in future using weather data. Based on all this the project will evaluate the nature of potential disruption in local communities created by heat system decarbonisation. It will engage with citizens to investigate their perceptions and expectations of heat system change. There are significant information gaps associated with the capacity of local energy distribution networks (gas, electricity and heat) to deliver energy for low carbon heating and cooling. Competing options include converting the gas grid to hydrogen, expanding electrification using heat pumps, and district heating. A key consideration is the nature of any constraints on the capacity of local networks, in particular the ability to deliver energy needed to meet peak demands, which can be far higher than average during extreme cold spells and perhaps in future during heat waves. Lack of both data and understanding of what disruption might be associated with heat system change are serious impediments to policy action on heat system decarbonisation. Research commissioned by the Committee on Climate Change analysis of a net zero target for 2050 concludes that utilisation of distribution network capacity is poorly understood. The project sets out to overcome this gap in information by evaluating what is known about distribution network condition based upon information reported by network companies and through interviews and surveys involving industry participants. It will compare electricity and gas networks and also consider district heating. Consumer acceptability of system change and local level disruption is also central to low carbon heat, yet it is similarly poorly understood and seldom linked to engineering detail at street or neighbourhood level. The project will use deliberative social science research to explore the expectations of citizens to the changes and disruption to local environments that might be associated with competing alternatives for delivering low carbon heating (and cooling) services to homes and businesses. Recent work on heat decarbonisation is strong with respect to assessment of end use technology options (i.e. what goes into the buildings) and on supply energy vectors (which energy source is utilised). However, it is weak on engineering, economic and social assessment of infrastructure needs and trade-offs - particularly for the 'last mile' or distribution network infrastructures that bring energy services to homes and businesses. This project is explicitly focused on this 'last mile' of infrastructure and combines engineering evaluation and constraint modelling with social science insights from public engagement with proposed heating solutions and their associated disruption(s), to assess the impacts of heat system change and what people think about them.

This proposal responds to a call from the Research Councils for a national Centre on energy demand research, building on the work of the existing six End Use Energy Demand Centres, for which funding ends in April 2018. Energy demand reduction is a UK success story, with a 15% fall in final energy consumption since 2004. Major further reductions are possible and will be needed, as part of a transformation of the energy system to low carbon, to deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UK carbon budgets. Moreover, a low carbon energy system will be increasingly reliant upon inflexible and variable electricity generation, and therefore demand will also need to become more flexible. In short, changes in energy demand reduction will need to go further and faster, and demand will need to become more flexible. These challenges have far-reaching implications for technology, business models, social practices and policy. Our vision is for energy demand research in the UK to rise to these challenges. The Centre's ambition is to lead whole systems work on energy demand in the UK, collaborating with a wider community both at home and internationally. We aim to deliver globally leading research on energy demand, to secure much greater impact for energy demand research and to champion the importance of energy demand for delivering environmental, social and economic goals. Our research programme is inter-disciplinary, recognising that technical and social change are inter-dependent and co-evolve. It is organised into six Themes. Three of these address specific issues in the major sectors of energy use, namely: buildings, transport and industry. The remaining three address more cross-cutting issues that drive changing patterns of demand, namely the potential for increased flexibility, the impact of digital technologies, and energy policy and governance. Each Theme has a research programme that has been developed with key stakeholders and will provide the capacity for the Centre to inform debate, deliver impact and share knowledge in its specific area of work. The Themes will also undertake collaborative work, with our first joint task being to assess the role of energy demand in delivering the objectives of the UK Government's Clean Growth Plan. The Centre will also include Challenges that respond to cross-thematic questions for UK energy demand. These will mostly be developed in consultation over the early years of the Centre, and therefore only one is included in the initial plan: on the decarbonisation of heat. The Centre will function as a national focus for inter-disciplinary research on energy demand. In doing this it will need to respond to a rapidly evolving energy landscape. It will therefore retain 25% of its funds to allocate during the lifetime of the Centre through a transparent governance process. These funds will support further challenges and a 'Flexible Fund', which will be used to support research on emerging research questions, in particular through support for early career researchers. We are working closely with key stakeholders in business and policy to design our research programme and we plan detailed knowledge exchange activities to ensure that the work of the UK energy demand research community has broader societal impact.

Energy models provide essential quantitative insights into the 21st Century challenges of decarbonisation, energy security and cost-effectiveness. Models provide the integrating language that assists energy policy makers to make improved decisions under conditions of pervasive uncertainty. Whole systems energy modelling also has a central role in helping industrial and wider stakeholders assess future energy technologies and infrastructures, and the potential role of societal and behavioural change. Despite this fundamental underpinning role, the UK has not had a national strategic energy modelling activity. Models have been developed on a fragmented, reactive and ad-hoc basis, with a critical shortfall in the continuity of funding to develop new models, retain human capacity, and link modelling frameworks in innovative ways to answer new research questions. The whole systems energy modelling (wholeSEM www.wholesem.ac.uk) consortium is explicitly designed to enable the UK to make an internationally leading research impact in this critical area, and hence to provide cutting-edge transparent quantitative analysis to underpin public and private energy systems decision making. Following a rigorous selection process, the wholeSEM consortium encapsulates leading and interdisciplinary UK capacity in quantitative whole systems energy research. The key aims of the interdisciplinary wholeSEM consortium are: 1. Undertake internationally cutting edge research on prioritised energy system topics; 2. Integrate whole energy systems modelling approaches across disciplinary boundaries; 3. Build bilateral engagement mechanisms with the wider UK energy systems community in academia, government and industry. The wholeSEM consortium will prioritise on key modelling areas of high relevance to interdisciplinary energy systems. Internationally leading research will focus on: 1. How does energy demand co-evolve with changes in practice, supply, and policy? 2. How will the endogenous, uncertain, and path dependent process of technological change impact future energy systems? 3. How can the energy supply-demand system be optimised over multiple energy vectors and infrastructures? 4. What are the major future physical and economic interactions and stresses between the energy system and the broader environment? The consortium, will employ extensive integration mechanisms to link and apply interdisciplinary models to key energy policy problems. This will take place across the conceptualisation and development of innovative modelling approaches, model construction, and through an integrated set of use-cases. A key element of the wholeSEM is substantive bilateral engagement with stakeholders in academia, government and industry. Multi-layered integration mechanisms will include: - A high-profile advisory board, with key policy/industry representation plus wider academic experts; - An innovative fellowship programme to enable bi-directional UK academic, policy and industrial and international experts to work with wholeSEM research teams; - A range of workshops including four internationally high profile annual UK energy modelling conferences, technical workshops focused on key modelling issues, and non-technical stakeholder workshops on model conceptualisation, development and use-cases; - Detailed and transparent documentation for all of the consortium's new energy models; - Model access, based on collaborative agreements with an expert model user group. This will ensure best-use of models, accountability and two-way flows of information from/to model developers, users and critics; - Collation and curation of energy modelling data sources (building off and working with the UKERC Energy Data Centre); - Provision of training in modelling techniques and software platforms, to train and develop the next generation of energy systems modellers, including interactions with centres for doctoral training (CDTs); - Interactive web-based information dissemination

Most energy system studies of the UK indicate a strong role for bioenergy in the coming decades, especially if the UK is to meet its climate change mitigation ambitions. However, there is a need to understand how bioenergy systems can be implement without negative sustainability-related implacts. There is therefore a need for multi-scale systems analyses to support the understanding of these inter-related issues and to support decision-making around land use, interactions with food production and acceleration of bioenergy technologies, while ensuring that a range of sustainability measures are quantified and that minimum standards can be guaranteed. This project will build on bioenergy system models (Imperial College, RRes, Soton) partners) and combine it with other models, including the UK-TIMES model (UCL), ecosystem and resource models (Soton, Manchester) and international trade models (UCL). This toolkit will be used to identify robust and promising options for the UK, including land use, resources and technologies. This overall modelling framework would be able to determine which value chains can best contribute to a technologically efficient, low cost and low carbon UK energy system. Configuring the model to avoid the use of side constraints to limit the amount of land available for bioenergy and bio-based materials/chemicals will lead to a better understanding of how biomass production can be intercalated into existing UK energy and agricultural infrastructures. This framework will be used to explore the bioenergy value chains and technology developments most relevant to the UK under different scenarios (e.g. high/low food security, high/low biomass imports etc.). The coupling to wider UK energy models as well as global resource models/data will ensure coherence in the overall systems and scenarios developed and to ensure clarity in the role of bioenergy in the wider UK energy system. Resource and technology models and information on future improvements as well as requirements for adoption and diffusion will be incorporated into the model. Sample value chains developed will also be assessed for their wider ecosystem impacts within the UK, particularly in terms of the change in expected key ecosystem services overall arising from changes in land use against a reference scenario. The implications of technological improvements in system critical technologies such as 2G biofuels, bio-SNG gas and the provision of renewable heat will also be considered. The linking of value chain and system models will help to examine the opportunities and indirect impacts of increased biomass use for energy and chemicals and critically evaluate mitigation strategies for GHG emissions and resource depletion, and will feed into a wider policy analysis activity that will examine the dynamics of changing system infrastructure at intermediate time periods between now and 2050. The key outcomes will include: - Understanding the potential and risks of different biomass technologies, and the interfaces between competing requirements for land use - Understanding cost reductions, lifecycle environmental profiles and system implications of bioenergy and biorenewables - Identifying and modelling the impact of greater system integration -integrated energy, food, by-product systems, and cascading use of biomass - Understanding what it would take to achieve a significant (e.g. 10%) contribution from biomass in the UK - and identify the pre-requisites/critical path for mobilisation (resources, policies, institutions and timescales). - Developing scenarios describing what policies, infrastructure, institutions etc. would be needed and where - Lifecycle, techno- and socio-economic and environmental/ecosystem, evaluation of the value chains associated with a material level of bioenergy in the UK

One third of the world's energy is used in industry to make products - the buildings, infrastructure, vehicles, capital equipment and household goods that sustain our lifestyles. Most of this energy is needed in the early stages of production to convert raw materials, such as iron ore or trees, into stock materials like steel plates or reels of paper and because these materials are sold cheaply, but use a lot of energy, they are already extremely energy efficient. Therefore, the key materials with which we create modern lifestyles - steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium in particular - are the main 'carriers' of industrial energy, and if we want to make a big reduction in industrial energy use, we need to reduce our demand for these materials. In the UK, our recent history has led to closure of much of our capacity to make these materials, and although this has led to reductions in emissions occurring on UK territory, in reality our consumption of materials has grown, and the world's use of energy and emission of greenhouse gases has risen as our needs are met through imports. The proposed UK INDEMAND Centre therefore aims to enable delivery of significant reductions in the use of both energy and energy-intensive materials in the Industries that supply the UK's physical needs. To achieve this, we need to understand the operation and performance of the whole material and energy system of UK industry; we need to understand better our patterns of consumption both in households, and in government and industry purchasing, particularly related to replacement decisions; we need to look for opportunities to innovate in products, processes and business models to use less material while serving the same need; and we need to identify the policy, business and consumer triggers that would lead to significant change while supporting UK prosperity. The proposer team have already developed broad-ranging work aiming to address this need, in close collaboration with industry and government partners: at Cambridge, the WellMet2050 project has opened the door to recognising Material Efficiency as a strategy for saving energy and reducing emissions, and established a clear trajectory for business growth with reduced total material demand; in Bath, work on embodied energy and emissions has created a widely adopted database of materials, and the Transitions and Pathways project has established a clear set of policy opportunities for low carbon technologies that we can now apply to demand reduction; work on energy and emissions embodied in trade at Leeds has shown how UK emissions and energy demand in industry have declined largely due to a shift of production elsewhere, while the true energy requirements of our consumption have grown; work on sustainable consumption at Nottingham Trent has shown how much of our purchased material is discarded long before it is degraded, looked at how individuals define their identity through consumption, and begun to tease out possible interventions to influence these wasteful patterns of consumption. The proposal comes with over £5m of committed gearing, including cash support for at least 30 PhD students to work with the Centre and connect its work to the specific interests of consortium partners. The proposal is also strongly supported by four key government departments, the Committee on Climate Change, and a wide network of smaller organisations whose interests overlap with the proposed Centre, and who wish to collaborate to ensure rich engagement in policy and delivery processes. Mechanisms, including a Fellows programme for staff exchange in the UK and an International Visiting Fellows programme for global academic leaders, have been designed to ensure that the activities of the Centre are highly connected to the widest possible range of activities in the UK and internationally which share the motivation to deliver reductions in end-use energy demand in Industry.