The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 highlighted the need for urgent, transformative change, on an unprecedented scale, if global warming is to be restricted to 1.5C. The challenge of reaching an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 represents a huge technological, engineering, policy and societal challenge for the next 30 years. This is a huge challenge for the transport sector, which accounts for over a quarter of UK domestic greenhouse gas emissions and has a flat emissions profile over recent years. The DecarboN8 project will develop a new network of researchers, working closely with industry and government, capable of designing solutions which can be deployed rapidly and at scale. It will develop answers to questions such as: 1) How can different places be rapidly switched to electromobility for personal travel? How do decisions on the private fleet interact with the quite different decarbonisation strategies for heavy vehicles? This requires integrating understanding of the changing carbon impacts of these options with knowledge on how energy systems work and are regulated with the operational realities of transport systems and their regulatory environment; and 2) What is the right balance between infrastructure expansion, intelligent system management and demand management? Will the embodied carbon emissions of major new infrastructure offset gains from improved flows and could these be delivered in other ways through technology? If so, how quickly could this happen, what are the societal implications and how will this impact on the resilience of our systems? The answer to these questions is unlikely to the same everywhere in the UK but little attention is paid to where the answers might be different and why. Coupled with boundaries between local government areas, transport network providers (road and rail in particular) and service operators there is potential for a lack of joined up approaches and stranded investments in ineffective technologies. The DecarboN8 network is led by the eight most research intensive Universities across the North of England (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) who will work with local, regional and national stakeholders to create an integrated test and research environment across the North in which national and international researchers can study the decarbonisation challenge at these different scales. The DecarboN8 network is organised across four integrated research themes (carbon pathways, social acceptance and societal readiness, future transport fuels and fuelling, digitisation, demand and infrastructure). These themes form the structure for a series of twelve research workshops which will bring new research interests together to better understand the specific challenges of the transport sector and then to work together on integrating solutions. The approach will incorporate throughout an emphasis on working with real world problems in 'places' to develop knowledge which is situated in a range of contexts. £400k of research funding will be available for the development of new collaborations, particularly for early career researchers. We will distribute this in a fair, open and transparent manner to promote excellent research. The network will help develop a more integrated environment for the development, testing and rapid deployment of solutions through activities including identifying and classifying data sources, holding innovation translation events, policy discussion forums and major events to highlight the opportunities and innovations. The research will involve industry and government stakeholders and citizens throughout to ensure the research outcomes meet the ambitions of the network of accelerating the rapid decarbonisation of transport.

The UK electricity system faces challenges of unprecedented proportions. It is expected that 35 to 40% of the UK electricity demand will be met by renewable generation by 2020, an order of magnitude increase from the present levels. In the context of the targets proposed by the UK Climate Change Committee it is expected that the electricity sector would be almost entirely decarbonised by 2030 with significantly increased levels of electricity production and demand driven by the incorporation of heat and transport sectors into the electricity system. The key concerns are associated with system integration costs driven by radical changes on both the supply and the demand side of the UK low-carbon system. Our analysis to date suggests that a low-carbon electricity future would lead to a massive reduction in the utilisation of conventional electricity generation, transmission and distribution assets. The large-scale deployment of energy storage could mitigate this reduction in utilisation, producing significant savings. In this context, the proposed research aims at (i) developing novel approaches for evaluating the economic and environmental benefits of a range of energy storage technologies that could enhance efficiency of system operation and increase asset utilization; and (ii) innovation around 4 storage technologies; Na-ion, redox flow batteries (RFB), supercapacitors, and thermal energy storage (TES). These have been selected because of their relevance to grid-scale storage applications, their potential for transformative research, our strong and world-leading research track record on these topics and UK opportunities for exploitation of the innovations arising. At the heart of our proposal is a whole systems approach, recognising the need for electrical network experts to work with experts in control, converters and storage, to develop optimum solutions and options for a range of future energy scenarios. This is essential if we are to properly take into account constraints imposed by the network on the storage technologies, and in return limitations imposed by the storage technologies on the network. Our work places emphasis on future energy scenarios relevant to the UK, but the tools, methods and technologies we develop will have wide application. Our work will provide strategic insights and direction to a wide range of stakeholders regarding the development and integration of energy storage technologies in future low carbon electricity grids, and is inspired by both (i) limitations in current grid regulation, market operation, grid investment and control practices that prevent the role of energy storage being understood and its economic and environmental value quantified, and (ii) existing barriers to the development and deployment of cost effective energy storage solutions for grid application. Key outputs from this programme will be; a roadmap for the development of grid scale storage suited to application in the UK; an analysis of policy options that would appropriately support the deployment of storage in the UK; a blueprint for the control of storage in UK distribution networks; patents and high impact papers relating to breakthrough innovations in energy storage technologies; new tools and techniques to analyse the integration of storage into low carbon electrical networks; and a cohort of researchers and PhD students with the correct skills and experience needed to support the future research, development and deployment in this area.

The UK has a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050 relative to 1990 levels. While the potential role of energy storage to support integration of RES and help meet these challenging targets is well recognised, development of suitable frameworks that could facilitate energy storage rollout is still lacking. This is due to multiple factors that can be reflected in relevant Research Challenges that this project aims to address. These include: - An adequate understanding of commercial, regulatory, and institutional settings that can facilitate storage deployment; - Gaining insights into the true value streams that individual storage devices and coordinated portfolios of different technologies can generate for different parties across different markets; - Modelling interactions and maximising synergies among different energy vectors, and in particular heat and gas besides electricity, in order to unlock the flexibility of multi-energy forms of storage; - Developing suitable techno-economic models that can cater for the relevant operational and investment uncertainties that affect storage operators and owners and properly consider network and market constraints; - Understanding of wider impacts and social responses of different storage technologies, including public perceptions and environmental impacts. Our Vision is to develop a comprehensive framework, supported by innovative techno-economic modelling techniques capable to deal with different types of operational and planning uncertainties as well as network constraints, aimed at fostering sustainable business cases for different types of energy storage. Our analyses will assess how individual energy storage devices or aggregated portfolios of devices connected to different network levels can provide multiple simultaneous steady-state, dynamic services and power quality services and assess the relevant impact and value arising from these services for different market parties. We will consider explicitly multi-energy forms of storage, and in particular different types of electrical energy storage and thermal energy storage technologies, as well as innovative technologies such as power-to-gas. Our models will be tested in various technical, commercial and regulatory environments and taking into account socio-economic and environmental aspects, including public perceptions to different technologies. The MY-STORE project will strategically supplement the current research and bring a new perspective by providing much broader context, understanding and responses to the wide-scale deployment of energy storage. Our Ambition is to be the first in the world to provide such a comprehensive framework that can inform policy debates and the business community on the value and role of any storage technology in the transition towards more sustainable energy networks. Notwithstanding the generality of the framework put forward, the studies will focus on the UK situation, with time horizons from short to medium term (around 2035) and then opening up to 2050 and beyond. In fact, part of our ambitious plan is to bring out the value and role of energy storage and demonstrate how it could be possible to build business cases already in the shorter term and even for technologies that are commercially available today (e.g., thermal energy storage and different types of batteries), and then to facilitate development of appropriate regulatory and market environments for wider scale storage deployment (and possibly based on new technologies) to deal with the challenges of developing a truly low-carbon energy system. Our research will put the UK at the international forefront in this important field and provide a secure platform for future developments, also based on close collaboration with our industrial partners which represent a variety of established and emerging multi-energy storage technologies that are being already deployed or trialled in the UK.

The current EngD Centre in Environmental Technology started in 1993 and was described in EPSRC's Review of the EngD Scheme in January 2007 as ...an excellent EngD Centre that should act as an exemplar to others . The new EngD Centre will build on this success with a related and expanded remit: to prepare engineers and scientists to meet the growing challenges in developing the UK towards sustainability in engineering and energy systems. The 5A rated (RAE 2001) Centre for Environmental Strategy (CES) is a unique, multidisciplinary research centre and alone in having the breadth and depth of expertise required to lead the new EngD Centre, with project and supervisory support from leading research groups across all Faculties at the University of Surrey. The success of the current EngD Centre has attracted an international reputation. Delegates from the US, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden have attended EngD conferences in the past, to observe how the programme functions and the professional standards reached. The Surrey EngD Management Executive Committee are currently advising the MIT-Portugal programme (an initiative to involve MIT in refreshing post-graduate engineering education throughout Portugal) on how an industrially-based doctoral programme modelled on the current Surrey EngD could be introduced in Portugal.Demand across industrial, business and policy sectors for highly skilled personnel to address this transdisciplinary, internationally-important agenda is growing rapidly and major skills shortages have been identified. Our approach is to selectively recruit and develop graduates with excellent technical skills and with the breadth and flexibility to understand the complex environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainability and to develop them to become effective agents of change in the transition to a sustainable economy. The EPSRC Review also recognised that a key strength in the current EngD is the high demand and repeat business from sponsoring companies : we have worked with 57 sponsoring organisations since 1993, with 30% returning to sponsor subsequent projects. Building on our experience in attracting, working with and retaining business, policy and industrial sponsors who are familiar with the Surrey EngD approach, we seek to augment the proposed intake of 50 EPSRC sponsored Research Engineers (REs) over five years, with a further 10 REs supported from University resources (an investment of 1M).The new Centre will retain the mission and approach of Surrey's existing EngD: taking a systems perspective and developing the professional graduates needed to drive and support progress towards sustainable delivery of goods and services. The demand for such trained personnel is illustrated by the increasing requirement for engineers and scientists to demonstrate competence in engineering for sustainability to achieve chartered status and throughout their continuing professional development. Increasing interest in carbon labelling and the requirement, shortly to be announced by the Carbon Trust, for accreditation in validating life cycle GHG emission calculations will increase further the demand for skilled professionals in this area. The key development for the new Centre is explicit recognition of the priorities for low carbon and sustainable energy operations and investments; our response is to develop and expand clusters of projects to meet the needs of our sponsor companies and the UK economy as a whole.End-user interest in sustainability and low carbon and energy systems is growing strongly, driven by multiple business and policy concerns. A continued and enlarged EngD Centre will allow us to go on working with companies, industrial sectors and policy makers to train the next generation of sustainability practitioners and leaders to respond to the challenge of creating and embedding sustainable practices across the UK.

This project aims to model demand-side flexibility coming from aggregation of a large number of residential and small and medium-size commercial end-users in the distribution network (DN). The algorithms developed through this project will facilitate more flexible operation of the DN by assessing the time varying capacity available from flexible loads, in response to flexible services currently procured by the distribution system operator (DSO), namely: Sustain, Secure, Dynamic and Restore. The aggregate flexibility will be described as the amount of available capacity and its duration, as a result of aggregating individual loads with different operating modes, start times, maximum deferral times, etc., driven by the end-users' daily behaviour and constrained by their comfort. Such flexibility profiling, corresponding to that of larger flexible resources already employed in practice (e.g., distributed generators or storage), will make provision of multiple flexible services accessible to small and medium-size end-users. This will result in increased flexibility of the DN as a whole. Furthermore, harnessing flexibility potential of residential and commercial users would have significant environmental implications, as these contribute to a large share to both, electrical usage and global greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of the project could be further complemented with smart meter data to develop tariffs and incentives for residential and commercial users, supporting more coordinated procurement of flexibility by reducing uncertainty of efficiency and outcome of the demand response (DR) programmes. The main beneficiaries of the research would be DSOs, aggregators and other DR responsible parties at the DN level. The question of flexibility modelling is not only important for reporting DR potential at the demand side (commonly, an aggregator's role), but also for more confident estimation of the outcome of DR programmes, tariff design and flexibility assessment, which are highly relevant to DSOs. One of the main benefits for DSOs brought by this project would be in supporting decision making when investing into incentives and infrastructure allowing network-wide control of flexible loads.