Consortium for Modelling and Analysis of Decentralised Energy Storage (C-MADEnS)

Around 80% of the UK population lives in urban areas, with cities being responsible for about 70% of UK energy use. As a consequence, the importance of cities in tackling key energy and environmental targets is increasingly being recognised. However, meeting these targets will require much of the urban infrastructure to be adapted and renewed to meet the increasing demands for energy services from city residents, while making the transition to a low-carbon economy. Two key challenges for urban infrastructure are: (i) meeting the expected increase in demand for (low carbon) electricity (including new sources of demand for heat and transport), while integrating a variety of (often variable) renewable supply options (including building integrated PV and wind systems) and (ii) increasing the proportion of low carbon heat (and potentially coolth) supply to homes and offices, with likely sources of low carbon heat including air source heat pumps and combined heat and power and district heating schemes using biomass and waste heat.

Various forms of decentralised electricity and heat storage could play an important role in meeting these challenges through helping to match supply and demand over periods from seconds to days, maximising the utilisation of existing and new infrastructure, providing links between heat and electricity systems so allowing trade-offs between the two and ensuring secure energy supplies. However, we currently have a poor understanding of the optimal deployment configurations and applications for decentralised electricity and heat storage within the urban environment, any changes to the policy and regulatory environment that would be needed to remove barriers to their deployment, the business models and revenue streams that might make a commercial proposition and the public attitudes to the deployment of different types of storage.

This project will use a variety of tools and methods, including technology validation, techno-economic modelling, innovation studies and public attitude surveys, to address specific barriers to the deployment of city-scale energy storage and demonstrate these methods and tools through a number of case studies analysing opportunities for energy storage deployment in the cities of Birmingham and Leeds. The novelty and adventure of our approach can be found both within the individual work packages and in the way that the findings are integrated together and applied in the case studies. So for example, our techno-economic modelling will consider specific (rather than generic) distributed energy storage technologies based on validated data from laboratory and field trials and not idealised data from the literature; our work on policy, regulatory and business models will draw on the real-world experience of our project partners in trying to make a business from operating distributed energy storage in current and likely future market conditions and our work on public attitudes will be the first study of its kind in the UK to examine distributed energy storage.

The impact of our research will cut across knowledge, people, society and the economy. Beneficiaries will include all those with an interest in, or who are affected by, city-level energy systems. Particular organisations will include:
(i) local and central government organisations (including local authorities and their associated delivery partners, local enterprise partnerships, central government offices, and government-funded agencies). These organisations will benefit from tools and results that will allow them to optimise their city energy networks, taking advantage of the benefits that storage can bring in terms of maximising existing infrastructure utilisation and providing links between heat and electricity systems so allowing trade-offs between the two and ensuring secure energy supplies.
(ii) engineering and consultancy businesses (that work with local authorities, developers and investors) will be able to use the results to tailor their technologies and business models to those (potentially niche) applications that are likely to prove most attractive initially, thus gaining valuable market experience. In the longer term, developers will be able to draw on the proposed centre's work to take a more strategic approach and expand and direct deployment to more mainstream applications using a range of storage technologies.
(iii) Energy storage industry, including firms manufacturing and installing storage technologies will gain a much better understanding of the immediate applications for their technologies, as well as the cost and performance goals that they will need to reach in order to make their technologies attractive to the market.
(iv) academia across multiple disciplines including, storage, end-use energy demand, heat energy systems, energy governance and policy. In particular the project will inform the work of the SUPERGEN Energy Storage Hub, including its roadmap activity, and through them, the broader energy storage research community.

The project will engage and communicate with these stakeholders through routes including meetings, workshops, high quality journal papers, presentations, videos, social media, web-pages and via the networks of our partners. A key benefit of our proposal is the direct, working relationship that the research team has with a range of stakeholders across city councils, technology development firms, energy utilities, engineering companies, community organisations and national and European policy makers. Many of these partners have been actively involved in helping to define the research questions presented in our proposal and will continue to be involved in advising on the research as it proceeds - ground-truthing and validating the results in terms of relevance and content - and contributing their expertise and data to the case studies.

In terms of the public, we will also participate annually in one of the British Council Festivals of Science and will display material produced on the teams' campuses at other times. The case studies we propose will provide an excellent opportunity for immediate exploitation of the research outputs and we will work with Leeds and Birmingham city councils to ensure that the findings from the case studies are implemented to the fullest extent possible. We will also work with the city-councils on information material that is suitable for use with city-residents to explain the value of role of energy storage.