MY-STORE: Multi-energY storage-Social, TechnO-economic, Regulatory and Environmental assessment under uncertainty

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.

This project will be the first in the UK to compare a wide range of multi-energy storage options, and electrical and thermal storage in particular, using a consistent interdisciplinary framework, with a key objective to inform on new business case opportunities already from the end of the project (2019). The interdisciplinary methodologies applied have significant value for a wide range of stakeholders. The project has in fact been informed through discussions with key players we have already done significant Smart Grid-related research work with, including on storage technologies, namely, ENWL, E.On, and Hitachi. In addition, other partners have clearly expressed interest in our innovative approach by participating in the project, as indicated in the enclosed letters of support. Thus, the outputs of this project will be extremely relevant to network operators such as ENWL, internationally leading technical consultants such as ARUP and EA Technology, energy companies such as E.On, providers of different types of energy storage technology such as S&C Electric (electric storage), Hitachi (electric and thermal storage), ITM Power (power-to-gas storage), Highview Power (liquefied air energy storage), and SMEs such as Upside. We also anticipate that other industrial partners will join the project as it progresses. Knowledge transfer and impact on industrial partners will be achieved through a range of mechanisms including their attendance at review meetings, workshops, and ongoing inputs and feedback from their side also based on the use of specific technology data and case studies that they will provide during the project.
We will also work with trade associations, policy makers, planners and regulators. In fact, energy storage technologies are frequently advocated as the game changer to address the energy trilemma of sustainability, affordability and security, which underpins the UK's economic and social well-being. Hence, if the system benefits of storage to address the trilemma are to be delivered, it will be essential that these groups understand the benefits and financial value of multi-energy storage portfolios so that appropriate commercial and regulatory frameworks are implemented. In order to do so, we will exploit our links with institutional bodies, the regulator Ofgem, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the Committee for Climate Change (CCC), the Association of Greater Manchester Authority, and social housing providers (due to carbon emissions and fuel poverty) to ensure maximum impact. The project outputs will aid UK government agencies such as DECC and CCC in developing future energy storage support and related policy strategies. For policy makers and statutory bodies, this research will provide the evidence base upon which to design public policies and national legislation that can maximise the potential value of storage technologies; we will produce a report for policy makers and regulators at the end of the project to summarize our findings in this direction. The general public will benefit from increased awareness and knowledge of energy storage, besides the economic and environmental system level benefits that can be achieved. In this light, we will explicitly explore the public perceptions of these technologies and the context within which they may be used, which will inform how organisations should deliver new energy storage. The assessment metrics to compare technologies and designed in collaboration with industry and public sector parties will also ensure the direct relevance and utility of the research outputs to the widest possible stakeholders. This will be facilitated by different stakeholder workshops that will include a broader range of interested parties. These activities will thus eventually enable the co-production of knowledge with academia, industry and regulators and ensure that all end-users and market actors receive maximum benefit from our research.