The provision of cold is a vital foundation of modern society to underpins many aspects of modern life, consumes up to 14% of the UK's electricity, and is also responsible for around 10% of UK's greenhouse gas emissions, including both CO2 associated with their power consumption and leakage of refrigerants with high Global Warming Potential (GWP). In order to achieve net-zero emission target in 2050 in the UK, we must significantly decarbonise the cooling sector. The decarbonisation of the cooling section requires to tackle two key challenges. Firstly, the leakage of traditional, refrigerants with high GWP is a key issue of the greenhouse gas emission of the cooling sector. It is, therefore, necessary to substitute them with low GWP natural refrigerant such as CO2. Secondly, the high-power consumption of the cooling sector also results in greenhouse gas emission if non-renewable power is consumed. Hence, cost-effective cold storage capacity will need to be deployed to maximise the use of intermittent renewable energy and cheap off-peak electricity. The recent study concluded that the addition of cold storage can potentially provide a 43% decrease in peak period consumption. In response to the challenges identified above, this project aims to develop a novel integrated system for cold energy generation and storage using CO2 hydrate as both refrigerant and storage material, contributing to the decarbonisation of the cooling sector in the UK and more widely the global. The multidisciplinary consortium, consisting of six leading researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Glasgow and Heriot-Watt, processes a wide range of well-balanced expertise including chemical engineering, thermodynamics, heat transfer, CFD, and economics to address several key scientific and technical challenges, and is further supported by several leading industrial partners to maximise knowledge exchange and impact delivery.

Our vision for the TransiT Hub is to harness the transformative power of Digital Twinning, and associated digital technologies, to solve the most pressing problems of our age - the rapid and radical decarbonisation of transport , holistically, across all modes - Road, Rail, Air and Maritime, and at a national scale. The TransiT Hub will create a new interdisciplinary challenge-led national digital twinning capability to deliver scalable solutions of the integration and decarbonisation of transport, providing the thought leadership and coordination it requires. This is an urgent response to the climate emergency that will advance understanding of a complex and adaptive system, reducing uncertainty and risk for time-critical investments into sustainable, ethical and affordable decarbonisation. It will be centred on expert problem articulation of the challenges, ensuring planners, operators, and policy makers, will use this new capability to deliver national transformation and realise good climate, economic and social outcomes across the stakeholder community, as well as providing a blueprint for other sectors. While past approaches utilised small-scale, real-world trials and progressive scale-up, the need for rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, combined with the increasingly complex interaction between transport modes precludes this approach. This situation is currently holding back private and public investment and risking the UK's leadership in tackling climate change. Scalable digital twinning offers a way of quickly assessing and narrowing the decarbonisation options for the complex whole transport system. To? realise our vision we will co-create 9 Federated Transport Digital Twins across modes and passenger/freight types, culminating in a Federated Transport System of Systems (FTSoS). These FTDTs will use novel capabilities to support the design, development, delivery and operation of a reliable, secure, resilient, inclusive, decarbonised transport system at lowest cost and delivering best value. We will use an active and agile learning-by-doing approach, that can adjust to stakeholders, withstand scrutiny, and feedback new knowledge to the next iteration. The creation of the FTSoS will address a new paradigm of Whole System Digital Twinning - bringing together, coordinating and extending existing DTs in the sector, delivering capabilities currently unachievable within siloed mode specific DTs. Our approach addresses the challenges in interoperability, security and resilience, human-centred design, data management, policy delivery, and new business models, whilst leveraging existing DTs, and Cyber Physical Infrastructure, and growing national digital twinning expertise and capability. This will be shared with, and benefit from, wider national DT programmes, including NDTP and Energy System DT (ENSIGN), and other strategic investments such as DARE and the EPSRC Transport DT Network+, as well as linking with representative bodies and collaborations such as DfT's TRIB and the DT Hub. The Hub will bring together seven distinguished higher education institutions, UofG, HW, UoL, UoB, CU, UoC and UCL that reflect a careful balance across modelling transport modes and the cross cutting themes essential for federated digital twinning including human factors, cyber security,? connectivity, policy, economics, and digital twinning tools. Furthermore, significant in kind support has been committed by external partners across government and industry partners, including the Department for Transport and over 40 organisations across the transport sector. Our foundational work will be explored through application focused use cases developed with our industrial and academic partners providing practical anchoring of the research; knowledge transfer through bi-directional secondments and the generation of evidence to support robust policy

Energy Storage (ES) has a key role to play as a part of whole UK and global energy systems, by providing flexibility, enhancing affordability, security and resilience against supply uncertainties, and addressing the huge challenges related to the climate change. Following UKRI investment over the last decade, the UK is in a strong position internationally in ES research and innovation. Although areas of UK expertise are world leading, there is little interaction between these areas and interplaying disciplines e.g. artificial intelligence, data and social sciences. This fragmentation limits the community's ability to deliver significant societal impact and threatens the continuity of delivering research excellence, missing opportunities as a result. Consequently, there is now an urgent need for the ES community to connect, convene and communicate more effectively. The proposed Supergen Storage Network Plus 2019 project (ES-Network+) responds to this need by bringing together 19 leading academics at different career stages across 12 UK institutions, with complementary energy storage (ES) related expertise and the necessary multidisciplinary balance to deliver the proposed programme. The aim of the ES-Network+ is to create a dynamic, forward-looking and sustainable platform, connecting and serving people from diverse backgrounds across the whole ES value chain including industry, academia and policymakers. As a focal point for the ES community, we will create, exchange and disseminate ES knowledge with our stakeholders. We will nurture early career researchers (ECR) in ES and establish ambitious, measurable goals for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). We will complement existing activities (e.g. Faraday Institution, UKERC, Energy Systems Catapult, CREDS, other Supergen Hubs) to serve the UK's needs, delivering impact nationally and internationally. The ES-Network+ will convene and support the ES community to deliver societal impact through technological breakthroughs, generating further value from the UKRI ES portfolio. It will be a secure and inclusive eco-system for researchers in ES & related fields to access, innovate, build and grow their UK and international networks. It is distinctive from the current Supergen Storage Hub: We have a PI with non-electrochemical background, an expanded investigator team with complementary expertise in energy network integration, mechanical and inter-seasonal thermal ES, hybrid storage with digital knowledge, cold storage, transport with ES integration, ES materials measurement & imaging and social science with policy implications. Early career researchers will hold key positions within the ES-Network+ and we will underpin all of our work with EDI values. We will develop an authoritative whitepaper for steering ES related decision-making, giving an overview of the ES community and a technical view on how ES research should be steered going forward. The team is extremely well-connected to the ES industry and the wider energy community and has secured 57 supporting organisations, including energy production, transmission, distribution & network operation, specialist aggregators of heat & power, storage technology developers and integrators; ES related manufacturers, ES related recycling; and research institutes/centres/hubs/networks/associations both nationally and internationally. The supporting organisations also bring in a significant amount of extra resources to ensure a successful delivery of the ES-Network+.