Energy Autonomous Community (Isle of Wight)

"Energy Autonomous Community will investigate the opportunities arising from the development of a Virtual Power Network (VPN) and flexibility marketplace on the Isle of Wight. It will create a local smart system, with the flexibility marketplace at its heart, which will allow the Island to improve its local energy management and usage and to progress its energy autonomy vision, to be self-sufficient in electricity from renewable sources.

The Isle of Wight is already experiencing many of the grid capacity issues that are expected to occur nationally as the energy revolution gathers pace. It has identified the need for a smart grid solution to facilitate its vision, given the physical and financial obstacles to further traditional reinforcement.

The concept and design study will focus on the West Wight area which contains approximately 15,000 households, including a significant proportion (20%) of off-gas properties. It will investigate how consumers can utilise electricity in a smart way by storing (both thermally and electrically) and using electricity during periods of high renewable generation, and reducing demand during low production periods. This process is known as 'load shifting' and various means of achieving this will be investigated. This includes domestic systems which integrate rooftop PV, domestic battery storage and electric vehicle (EV) charging systems with the heating component; public EV charging points which have variable tariffs depending on the amount of local generation available; and large battery storage systems connected to solar farms. Together, these solutions will ensure maximum power usage of real time renewable generation.

The study will investigate how flexibility can give all generators the option to sell power into the local flexibility market and connect local generation more directly with local consumers. This is likely to require new commercial models such as peer-to-peer (P2P) trading and a platform which manages the flexibility system by informing consumers when cheaper local power is available.

These new models will be fully investigated to ensure that they can deliver consumer choice and energy security.

This concept and design study will explore the transition to low carbon generation. Whilst it will take place on the Isle of Wight, the results are likely to be replicable in any area in the UK with a desire for high levels of distributed generation and a wish for the community to be a primary beneficiary of that generation."