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

Completed

Other Power and Storage Technologies(Energy storage)

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Economics and Econometrics)
SOCIAL SCIENCES (Politics and International Studies)
SOCIAL SCIENCES (Sociology)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Systems Analysis related to energy R&D (Other Systems Analysis)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Consumer attitudes and behaviour)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Professor P Taylor
Process, Environmental and Material Eng
University of Leeds

Standard

EPSRC

01 October 2015

31 January 2019

40 months

£1,136,810

Energy

Yorkshire & Humberside

Energy : Energy

Professor P Taylor, Process, Environmental and Material Eng, University of Leeds

Dr C Bale, Process, Environmental and Material Eng, University of Leeds
Dr TT Cockerill, Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London
Dr Y Ding, Inst of Particle Science & Engineering, University of Leeds
Dr M Giulietti, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham
Dr P A Jennings, School of Engineering, University of Warwick
Dr J Radcliffe, Electronic, Electrical and Computer Eng, University of Birmingham
Dr P Upham, Process, Environmental and Material Eng, University of Leeds

Project Contact, Department of Energy & Climate Change
Project Contact, Hubbard Products Limited
Project Contact, Highview Power Storage
Project Contact, Scottish and Southern Energy plc
Project Contact, Moixa Technology Limited
Project Contact, Engie Resources, USA
Project Contact, UK Power Networks
Project Contact, EDF Energy
Project Contact, Birmingham City Council
Project Contact, Tata Group UK
Project Contact, Leeds City Council
Project Contact, Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership

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 studyof its kind in the UK to examine distributed energy storage

29/10/15