Research

Lead: Peter Taylor and Sheridan Few

This work package will maximise impact by engaging with a diverse range of stakeholders, using various participatory processes to model and analyse the evolution of future networks and support decision making. The focus will be on what action needs to be taken now in the face of uncertainty about a range of technical, economic and social factors, including how best to support the most vulnerable members of society.

Lead: Furong Li and Chenghong Gu

This WP will design a holistic commercial framework for promoting cross-vector network services and recovering network costs. A whole-system framework will be developed to extend traditional services based on costs and quantities and encompass provider responsiveness.

Lead: Robin Preece

This WP will quantify risk and resilience in future energy
networks using innovative metrics, will exploit these to quantify the risks associated with different system shocks, develop services to minimise risks and better inform decision making under uncertainty.

Lead: Jianzhong Wu and Muditha Abeysekera

Our aim is to support impactful whole energy system research that makes a rapid, fair transition to NetZero a reality. We are focused on leveraging synergies across all energy networks (i.e. electricity, gas, hydrogen, heat and cooling) as one integrated system and using this holisticperspective to guide investment and operational decisions on energy systems.​

Our ongoing work includes the development of a whole energy systems of systems architecture that maps key players and processes involved in the planning and operation of multi-energy networks, enhancing multi-vector energy systems situational awareness through advanced measurements combined with machine learning techniques, a vision for a future experience across energy network planning and operation with feasible operating region maps, and the repurposing and rebalancing of electricity, gas, heating networks.​

Our aim is to provide evidence-based recommendations for coordinated actions and decisions at all levels of multi-energy networks, as well as the necessary technologies for a just ​and expedited transition.​

Lead: Furong Li and Chenghong Gu

 Our mission is to develop transformative Energy Network Solutions for Large-Scale Net Zero Energy Systems, fasting track the integration and utilisation of large-scale renewable, low-carbon energy conversion and system-spread flexibility.​

We develop holistic network investment through developing deep insights the changing network needs from integration of large-scale offshore renewable and system-wide flexibility. We also develop reliable and efficient decision-making tools for zero-carbon system operation, able to manage millions of interactive devices for energy and power balance at scale. Webring together technical, commercial, digital and social solutions across multiple energy systems. The solutions we are delivering are to ensure the tens of billions of pounds of investment in gas and electricity transmission networks is optimal in the face of deep uncertainties and rising complexity.​

Lead: Grant Wilson and David Greenwood

To transform regional and local energy networks into active drivers of the Net Zero transitionwhich integrate local energy sources and users, facilitate rapid behavioural and technological changes, and empower active energy communities. Local and regional networks aredefined as a bounded system within a specific geographical area, with energy quantifiable energy flows into and out of the system. Example local systems might be a building, auniversity campus, or an industrial site, while regional systems could be a DNO license area or combined authority. Local and regional systems can either be viewed from an internalperspective, in which they are the focus and the wider system is abstracted, or as an aggregated, controllable element of a larger system.​

The possibilities of greater integration of planning and operation of electricity, gas and heat-networks at local and regional levels face several significant challenges: access andsharing of appropriate data across energy vectors; questions of governance, investment and operational control; how to manage the tension of differing complex views of future localenergy systems. ​

Across all these challenge areas it is increasingly understood that having access to appropriately detailed, timely and clean data across different energy vectors provides multipleadvantages. This mission has data surfacing and coordination of local resources as core elements, with additional areas of focus on the possibilities and challenges of a RegionalEnergy Systems Operator.​

Lead: Alessandra Parisio

In this WP we will demonstrate the transformational potential of digitalisation to help create a highly interconnected and flexible multi-energy network.
A close collaboration with industrial partners is envisaged to make sure that practical and commercial
aspects related to the deployment of digital solutions are adequately considered