Joint UK-India Clean Energy Centre (JUICE)

Energy is a key driver of economic and sustainable social welfare. It is an essential prerequisite for modern industry and commerce. The need to decarbonise the energy supply is generally accepted and solar photovoltaics (PV) will play a large role in this in both the UK and India. The two countries have seen very rapid installation since both countries introduced their respective market stimulation programmes in 2010, cumulative installations have risen to 5GW (India) and 8.5 GW (UK) by December 2015. This has had a very significant impact on the power system and may endanger quality of supply or grid reliability. JUICE will focus on tools to understand and quantify the associated issues, find the most economical way to ameliorate or control the issues generated.

PV can often be located near to load centres but its temporal alignment with conventional demand profiles is far from perfect. Electricity at the wrong time or in the wrong place has very little value and there are already numerous examples of PV (and other sources) having to be curtailed when local demand or capability to transport it are insufficient. As the penetration of installed PV increases, so too does the need for its effective integration into power systems at all levels and including both national and localised networks. Energy storage and demand-side response will play a big role in this as well as managing grid capacity. JUICE would be investigating the amount of generation of PV, the stress this is putting on the network, the cost and benefits of mitigation technology options (storage and demand shift). The inclusion of storage and PV places relatively large power electronic converters into the system, which may also allow further services to stabilise the network to be viable technically as well as economically. It is key to address these challenges across the different research communities, as changes in one technology may change the boundary conditions for others and e.g. economics may change drastically. JUICE will, as an example, look at the viability of storage technologies in dependence of quantity of installed PV, local demand and transfer capacity.

JUICE will bring together internationally leading experts in PV technology, applied PV systems, power electronics, electricity networks, energy storage and demand-side response; and through their combined efforts, will develop integrated solutions to ensure that the value of PV generation is optimised in both India and the UK. The techniques and solutions developed will also be readily transferable to many other countries that face similar challenges and contribute to increase economic and environmental welfare in developing and developed countries. The breadth of experience and skills brought by the collective UK and India teams is appropriate to the scale of the problem and will encourage development of novel concepts and solutions to these global challenges.

In the UK, the team has been drawn from the national flagship SuperGen projects: SuperSolar, HubNet and SuperStore, which specialise in PV, networks and energy storage respectively. In India, world-leading universities and researchers will be led by IIT-KGP and IIT-B. JUICE will focus on a value optimisation for the end user, i.e. meeting demand at the lowest economic and environmental cost. Specific topics to be addressed include: PV yield optimisation and localisation, transmission and distribution network stability and utilisation, microgrids, the control and lifetime of storage and its role alongside demand response.
The overarching integrative management of the centre will ensure that the specific technical developments undertaken by the partners are coordinated and effective in contributing to the overall aims of providing improved energy services, lowering environmental impacts and minimising costs.

The impact of the Joint UK India Virtual Clean Energy Centre, and its three constituent centres JUICE, IUCERE and UKICERI, will be to reduce the costs of energy provision in general, increase sustainability and security of supply, and importantly enabling remote, poorer communities to get access to electricity. Given that energy is a major driver in economic and social welfare, the impact will be to improve the prosperity of the two nations.

The integration of intermittent sources is currently not well understood, resulting in sometimes wasteful behaviour. E.g. in Germany PV plants are required to down-regulate in certain conditions, i.e. there is energy wasted. Another example of the timing of supply not being synchronised with demand and resulting in significant economic losses are the rolling brown outs experienced in California, which happen despite rapid uptake of distributed energy sources. JUICE will develop a set of tools and databases to minimise these effects for India as well as the UK and internationally.

JUICE involves major industrial players being active in relevant areas. With their guidance, a set of urgently required modelling chains will be created that allow the forecasting, control and optimisation of clean energy supply in power systems as well as microgrids. The integration will minimise wastage and thus decrease costs. This will be achieved by novel multi-parameter optimisations allowing comparative analysis of e.g. increasing storage vs transfer capacity vs demand modifications in areas of high PV penetration.

Tools to ensure safe and robust operation of the power systems in the presence of fast changing intermittent energy sources with or without short-term storage buffers or demand modifications will increase security of supply.

JUICE will also train engineers and practitioners in demand by the clean energy industry, as well as more generically any industry where engineering is relevant. There are integration focussed, industry facing workshops planned for the dissemination of specific findings to relevant industrial participants. This will be supported by the KTN to ensure that the right target group is met. There will also be direct training for the staff involved in the research, the associated PhD cohort as well as training of masters level students at the various partner universities.

By fostering the development of expertise and critical mass in the modelling, characterising and optimisation of network services, this project will meet the EPSRC goal of improving the UK's competitiveness in the fields of energy integration, storage and renewable technologies. The project will also address the aims of DST to enhance the power system and meet the demand of urban and rural dwellers which struggle to have reliable supply, or any supply at all. In addition, the project will deliver against the primary objectives of the Newton-Bhabha fund to provide Official Development Assistance via the parent country to enhance energy provision and security of supply in the partner country (India). This project is fully aligned with the socio-economic development priorities of the Newton- Bhabha Fund since energy is a major growth engine of economic wealth, making energy available to people allows economic and social prosperity to follow. Enhancing access to and the provision of clean energy aligns with all three priorities of the Newton-Bhabha fund, supporting the development of sustainable cities and urbanisation, enhancing public health and wellbeing, whilst further enhancing the energy-water-food nexus. This project will exemplify how the cooperation between the UK and India working on aligned renewable energy challenges will facilitate development and deployment of industrially relevant research hosted in the communities for economic growth and social benefit in the partner country.