This project aims to understand how novel energy storage technologies might best be integrated into an evolving, lower-carbon UK energy system in the future. It will identify technical, environmental, public acceptability, economic and policy issues, and will propose solutions to overcome barriers to deployment. As electricity is increasingly generated by highly-variable renewables and relatively inflexible nuclear power stations, alternatives to the use of highly-flexible fossil-fuelled generation as a means of balancing the electricity system will become increasingly valuable. Numerous technologies for storing electricity are under development to meet this demand, and as the cost of storage is reduced through innovation, it is possible that they could have an important role in a low-carbon energy system. The Energy Storage Supergen Hub is producing a UK roadmap for energy storage that will be the starting point for this project. The value of grid-scale storage to the electricity system has been assessed for some scenarios. For extreme cases comprising only renewable and nuclear generation, the value is potentially substantial. However, the value of energy storage to the UK depends on the costs and benefits relative to sharing electricity imbalances through greater European interconnection, demand-side electricity response, and wider energy system storage, and the optimal approaches to integrating energy storage at different levels across the whole energy system are not well understood. This project will take a broader approach than existing projects by considering energy system scenarios in which storage options are more integrated across the whole energy system, using a series of soft-linked energy and electricity system models. Demand-side response and increased interconnection will be considered as counterfactual technologies that reduces the need for storage. Three broad hypotheses will be investigated in this project: (i) that a whole energy system approach to ES is necessary to fully understand how different technologies might contribute as innovation reduces costs and as the UK energy system evolves; (ii) that a range of technological, economic and social factors affect the value of ES, so should all be considered in energy system scenarios; and, (iii) that the economic value of the difference between good and bad policy decisions relating to the role of energy storage in the transition to low-carbon generation is in the order of £bns. A broader, multidisciplinary approach, which extends beyond the techno-economic methodologies that are adopted by most studies, will be used to fully assess the value of energy storage. This project will therefore also examine public acceptability issues for the first time, compare the environmental impacts of storage technologies using life-cycle analyses, and examine important economic issues surrounding market design to realise the value of storage services provided by consumers. All of these analyses will be underpinned by the development of technology-neutral metrics for ES technologies to inform the project modelling work and the wider scientific community. These multidisciplinary considerations will be combined in a series of integrated future scenarios for energy storage to identify no-regrets technologies. The project will conclude by examining the implications of these scenarios for UK Government policy, energy regulation and research priorities. The analyses will be technical only to the point of identifying the requirements for energy storage, with absolutely no bias towards or against any classes of storage technology.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The objective of the Fellowship is to create a new platform to identify millions of streams of power flows in the large-scope distribution network to enable the ambitious blockchain technology for the power industry, which is seen as a future trend with a growing number of distributed energy resources. I believe that the eventual peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity market can only be realised when individual transactions can be physically traced to enhance the transparency and reflect the actual usage of the network for correct billing. This Fellowship questions the overlook of the present blockchain concept on the power grid infrastructure and proposes to analytically uncouple transactions from the usage of the physical medium for electricity transport. This Fellowship pushes the complex power systems (particularly distribution networks) analytics to its new limits by i) exploiting geographical information system with new distribution power flow tracing techniques with newly defined trait; ii) taking into account the mobility of distributed energy resources, e.g. electric vehicles, battery energy storage to flexible electricity trading from the physical constraint of the infrastructure; iii) using analytical, signal processing and chromatics methodology with smart metering data to improve power flow tracing performance especially for highly complicated distribution networks with microgrids and millions of nodes to represent all market participants; iv) developing a new tool as a fundamental layer of application programming interface to the future blockchain platform. The outcome of this Fellowship will not only shed light on the fundamental barriers on the energy P2P sharing economy but will also lead to the rollout of blockchain in the energy sector by enabling substantial public engagement to realise "Decarbonisation, Deregulation, Decentralisation" via "Transactions, Transparency, Traceability, Time-stamped, Trust".

Modern energy systems are complex technical, social and economic endeavours formed through the assembly of a broad set of elements and shaped by the actions of many multiple actors including consumers, suppliers and regulators. While some gains can be achieved by optimising parts of these systems, significant reduction in energy demand is a major challenge requiring changes in behaviour from all the actors involved. In this proposal we wish to exploit the ability of digital technologies to monitor, model and represent the operation and effects of energy demand to promote changes in these systems. This is often realised through a set of actions and measures, commonly known as demand side management (DSM). Current approaches to DSM and reduction of energy demand, however, are often viewed entirely from the consumer's perspective, concentrating mostly on the importance of behavioural changes and the role of energy displays (or smart meters ) as main drivers of these changes. This emphasises only one part of modern and increasingly complex energy systems, which actually need to be understood in their entirety to ensure that changes will have both significant and sustainable impact. Accordingly, this proposal adopts an end-to-end approach to exploit digital technology to understand the overall energy supply system (from generation to transmission, distribution and utilisation), in which devised changes are targeted at the points of maximum impact and all involved system elements are fully optimised to reap the benefits of these changes.The ultimate aim of our research is to answer how the significant potential benefits of DSM can be maximised through the provision of a unified, versatile and affordable digital infrastructure that allows us to reason across a whole energy system and supports new ways to exchange information between dynamic multiscale DSM models. The expected outcome is access to, and presentation of, not just quantitative information (e.g. the amount of modified active/reactive power demands), but also qualitative information (e.g. what are the actual load mixes and load sectors responsible for the changes in demand and what are their definite effects) to all involved stakeholders. In particular, we wish to link the use of modern digital technologies, capable of impacting the behaviour of the consumers, with the ability to optimally respond to the resulting changes in energy demand. The project team brings together researchers with a background in ubiquitous computing, complex systems modelling and user centred development to work with researcher focusing of real world energy systems and energy economics. We will adopt a user driven approach to the design and development of a series of computational models and digital technologies working closely with consumers, energy supply companies and government bodies to explore a set of exciting state-of-the-art innovations based on low-cost sensing and display technologies. The project team has strong connections with key industrial, public sector and academic groups in UK and internationally, and these will be used to ensure that the proposed research will have maximum impact. Free access to any developed system to promote change, and a publicly accessible web site will be maintained for the dissemination of the results. We intend to make any software artefacts and device designs available via open source distribution through the Horizon DE Hub. We will build upon our existing public dissemination work to emphasise issues of ethics and societal impact as important features of this work.

The cooling sector currently consumes around 14% of the UK's electricity and emits around 10% of the UK's greenhouse gases. Global electricity demand for space cooling alone is forecast to triple by 2050. Moreover, as air temperature increases, the cooling demand increases, but a refrigerator's Coefficient of Performance decreases. This results in a time mismatch between a refrigerator's efficient operation and peak cooling demand over a day. Clearly, this problem will deteriorate over the coming decades. Indeed, research by UKERC recently reported that cooling sector will cause a 7 GW peak power demand to the grid by 2050 in the UK. A solution is to employ cold thermal energy storage, which allows much more flexible refrigeration operation, thereby resulting in improved refrigeration efficiency and reduced peak power demand. Large-scale deployment of cold thermal energy storage could dramatically reduce this peak demand, mitigating its impact to the grid. Moreover, the UK curtails large amounts of wind power due to network constraints. For example, over 3.6TWh of wind energy in total was curtailed on 75% of days in 2020. Therefore, through flattening energy demand, cold thermal energy storage technology provides a means to use off-peak wind power to charge cold thermal energy storage for peak daytime cooling demand. This project, based on the proposed novel adsorption-compression thermodynamic cycle, aims to develop an innovative hybrid technology for both refrigeration and cold thermal energy storage at sub-zero temperatures. The resultant cold thermal energy storage system is fully integrated within the refrigerator and potentially has significantly higher power density and energy density than current technologies, providing a disruptive new solution for large scale cold thermal energy storage. The developed technology can utilise off-peak or curtailed electricity to shave the peak power demand of large refrigeration plants and district cooling networks, and thus mitigates the impacts of the cooling sector on the grid and also reduces operational costs.