Results: Searching for 'Energy Demand'

ETI’s Strategy Manager Hannah Evans presents “Bridging the gap between technological innovation and market demand” at the Bio Based Innovations Expo 2017

This document provides an abstract and a brief summary of the project titled "COLDROOM - Improving food temperature control in chilled and frozen storage rooms".

There are over 7,000 food manufacturers in the UK. At least 50% of these manufacturers operate refrigerated storage areas. In addition, all food retailers and most catering establishments also operate cold stores.

One, if not the most important, change in food refrigeration in the last 10-15 years has been the realisation of the interdependence of the different refrigeration operations and the concept of the 'cold chain'. It is essential, if food quality and safety are to be maximised, to attain:

1. The optimal rate of temperature reduction in primary chilling and freezing.
2. Maintenance of the correct temperature throughout storage, processing, distribution and retailing.

The main project objectives were to improve the safety, quality and economics of chilled and frozen storage by closer control of food temperature. This was achieved by developing a user-friendly model to predict food temperatures in chilled and frozen storage rooms under real operating conditions. The model allows:

1. Cold room operators, contractors, and manufacturers to specify and design cold rooms to keep food at optimum temperatures under actual working conditions.
2. Users to rapidly predict the effect of operating conditions and loading patterns on performance and identify how they can avoid unacceptable food temperatures.

The model was verified against data for a chilled cold room operating at temperatures of between 1 and 10°C. The verification trials included simulated cold room breakdown and extended door openings during loading. The overall mean difference between the predicted and experimental centre and surface food temperatures were found to be less than 0.7°C.

The evidence given below is largely drawn from a recent (and ongoing) assessment of the opportunities for energy efficiency, fuel switching and material demand reduction within the UK steel sector. Additional information is also provided related to previous work by the authors on material efficiency. The work has been conducted as part of the Materials and Products theme of the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS). In the near future the work will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and will be available as a final version. The authors are happy to discuss the contents of the response further if this is helpful.

Energy Systems Catapult has identified a range of options for reducing the capital costs of rolling out low carbon district heat networks across the UK, laid out in a report for the Energy Technologies Institute. Improving district heating networks in the UK District heating, where all buildings within an area share a single heat source, has the potential to play a far greater role in the UK energy system. However, work must be done to help heat networks evolve. If fully exploited, nearly half of all heat demand could be met by heat networks. Capital costs are the main barrier to progress in this area. However, we believe these proposals could reduce capital costs by up to 40%, rendering heat networks more attractive than other forms of low carbon heat provision. Reducing heat network costs - eight cost-saving route maps: We have suggested eight 'route maps' designed to cut costs for district heating network deployment in the UK:
Knowledge Management Research and Training - Establish a District Heating Knowledge Centre to share learning and increase the impact of all other innovations. This knowledge centre would disseminate current best practice and outputs of other innovations, bringing together a wide group of stakeholders.
Low Flow Rate Design - Develop tools to help increase the accuracy of heat demand estimates and maximise the difference between temperatures entering and leaving the building.
Radical Routes - Reduce costs of civil engineering by running distribution pipes along the buildings themselves; either in the eaves or on the front. This is most effective in terraced housing but can be implemented cost-effectively in semi-detached areas.
Trenchless Technologies - Drill tunnels underneath the surface, removing the need for trenching. The technology for this already exists but key products need development to make it more cost effective.
Improved Front End Design and Planning - Demonstrate and quantify the positive impact of improved design work and surveying. This includes undertaking detailed survey and design work early, focussing on the activities that realise the greatest cost savings as well as adopting alternative contract frameworks to minimise the pricing of risk.
Shared Civil Engineering Costs - Share the costs of civil engineering between utilities working in the same region. This solution includes aligned planning cycles, developing a Streetworks Partnership, and joint ventures between district heating and utility companies.
Direct Heat Interface Unit System and Existing Hot Water Storage - Demonstrate the potential cost savings of replacing indirect with direct Heat Interface Units (HIUs) whilst making use of existing hot water tanks. This would include some product development to alleviate perceived risks to the consumer. Heat Interface Unit Optimisation - Innovate to reduce the cost of HIUs for retrofit schemes from approximately £1,500 to £200.
Next Steps for UK Heat Networks To enable innovations to reduce capital costs within heat network infrastructure, UK central and devolved governments need to provide frameworks that support demonstration, knowledge transfer and skill development in the sector. Elevating heat networks to be included as infrastructure within the Infrastructure and Project Authority will give impetus for stakeholders to innovate. It would demonstrate that the UK government recognises that the need for and scale of our heat network development is a major infrastructure project.

For bioenergy to sustainably deliver around 10% of UK energy demand in the 2050s, a mixture of UK-grown biomass, residual waste streams and imported biomass will be needed. Expanding UK biomass production will require the UK to make more effective use of new and existing forestry and expand production of second generation energy crops, such as Miscanthus, Short Rotation Coppice willow and Short Rotation Forestry. The ETI�s Characterisation of Feedstocks (CoF) project was carried out by Forest Research and Uniper Technologies Ltd and ran from February 2015 to March 2017. Its purpose was to develop our understanding of the variability of different UK-produced bioenergy feedstocks and the causes of this variation. This project has generated valuable data on the composition of UK-grown feedstocks and their provenance. Some findings from the project corroborated existing knowledge and practice but others, such as the impact of storage type on Miscanthus bale quality, challenge existing assumptions and warrant further research. The testing of Miscanthus pellets also highlights the potential for the pelleting process to unintentionally affect the composition of the pellets, with potentially detrimental impacts on a downstream conversion technology. The TEABPP (Techno-Economic Assessment of Biomass Pre-Processing) project developed a process model which uses best available data to model bioenergy value chains with and without pre-processing. Whilst the model results from the TEABPP project did not highlight many clear circumstances in the UK under which pre-processing would reduce the costs of the bioenergy value chains considered, it did show that most conversion technologies would have to operate with feedstocks characteristics outside of their normal operating range if using Miscanthus, SRC willow or SRF.

We welcome the idea of offering more policy support to SMEs to enable them to take up more energy efficiency opportunities, to the benefit of their enterprises, the economy as a whole and the environment. Researchers have previously argued that there is not enough policy focus on SMEs (Banks et al, 2012, Hampton and Fawcett, 2017) and this consultation is valuable as part of a wider process of policy development. This response covers general issues about design of policy for energy efficiency improvement in SMEs, and offers specific evidence on Option 2: a business energy efficiency obligation. We take the view that there is not enough information on the scale and scope of the proposed scheme to come down strongly in favour of Option 1, 2 or 3. However, we note that Option 2 has a strong and successful record across many countries, and there is considerable well documented evidence on how and why Energy Efficiency Obligation policies for business can work.

This document is the final report for the project titled 'Fostering the Development of Technologies and Practices to Reduce the Energy Inputs into the Refrigeration of Food'.

The project has used all the data that is currently available to map energy use in the refrigeration from primary chilling through to catering and retailing together with estimates of potential for improvement. This has provided a ranked order of the top 10 application areas where the largest gains can be made. The top 10 and the data used to calculate the top ten has been widely disseminated and discussed. It has stood up to intense scrutiny and is accepted by the industry as a true reflection of the current cold chain.

It is notable that retail and catering are top of the list, followed by transport with food processing and storage applications coming much lower down. The energy saving potential of the top three sectors being almost 10 times that of the next 7 combined. There are however error bars in the estimates of current use and thus savings potential. This is mainly due to a lack of detailed metering in the industry and mechanisms for collating such information. The lack of detailed data also means that it has not been possible to benchmark actual versus theoretically needed energy in the various application areas. This is especially true in refrigeration operations such as primary and secondary chilling and freezing where there is little data relating the energy consumed to the throughput of the food being processed. In the few cases such as the primary chilling of meat carcases it is clear that the energy required to maintain an empty chill room is of the same magnitude as that required when the system is doing its job of chilling meat.

The objectives for this project are:

Objective 1 - Identify and rank 10 "operations" (process/food combinations) in order of the potential by the use of improved technology and enhanced business practice to reduce energy usage in food refrigeration.

Objective 2.1 - Develop generic technologies and business practices that have the potential to reduce refrigeration energy consumption.

Objective 2.2 - Identify the features of the most efficient current systems and make them and their energy saving potential widely known to the industry.

Objective 2.3 - Identify and overcome any barriers to the uptake of current technologies that have the potential to substantially improve the energy efficiency of the 10 operations identified in 1.

Objective 2.4 - Quantify work being carried out to fill gaps in knowledge/technology identified to improve energy efficiency of the 10 operations identified in 1.

Objective 2.5 - Develop programmes to obtain the funding required to provide the missing information if no current work identified in objective 2.4.

Objective 3 - Carry out feasibility studies on current technologies that have the potential to achieve substantial energy saving in food refrigeration that are developed to a stage where they can immediately obtain funding from other sources.

UK industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must fall by more than 90% over the next 30 years to be consistent with an economy-wide target for net zero GHG emissions by 2050. The impact of current industrial decarbonisation policies is far below what is required for this level of ambition. There is therefore an urgent need to consider how new policies might be designed and implemented to deliver wide-scale and rapid reductions in industrial emissions. To help inform their recommendations for a 6th Carbon Budget, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) asked the University of Leeds to undertake independent research to evaluate which policies (and combinations of policies) would enable industrial decarbonisation in line with the UK's net zero target, without inducing carbon leakage. The research has focused on policies applicable to the manufacturing sector, but with some consideration also given to the policies required to decarbonise the Fossil Fuel Production and Supply and Non-Road Mobile Machinery sectors. In this report we:Conduct a comprehensive review of existing policies;Identify future policy mechanisms that address key challenges in decarbonising industry;Explore how combinations of policies might work together strategically in the form of 'policy packages' and how these packages might evolve over the period to 2050;Evaluate a series of illustrative policy packages, and consider any complementary policies required to minimise carbon leakage and deliver 'just' industrial decarbonisation

The objective of the Distributed Energy (DE) Programme is to increase the uptake of DE through the development of integrated systems in order to reduce through-life costs, improve ease of installation and increase efficiency in the combined generation of heat and electricity. Within this programme framework the objective of the Macro DE FRP will develop and validate a software methodology to enable the design of optimised DE solutions where clusters of demand sites are linked with appropriate DE supply equipment. The project will quantify the opportunity for Macro level DE (up to 50MW) in the UK and the potential to accelerate the development of appropriate technology by 2020 for the purposes of significant implementation by 2030

Subsequent to this report it was agreed to purchase CreditSafe’s registered company database due to its better overall accuracy of key indicator data for the tertiary sector.

Having developed and validated a method for forecasting energy demand, the next steps within this particular work package are

1. To develop an approach for creating around 20 UK “Characteristic Zones” to calculate aggregated zonal demand.
2. Develop an approach for assessing large UK waste heat emitters

In addition with a separate work package (WP4) the consortium will develop a design/optimisation methodology to aggregate zonal energy demand data and design/optimise zonal DE centre’s using the temporal demand profiles from this deliverable together with a library of DE technology/equipment (WP3). This design/optimisation methodology will be embedded in a pre-prototype software too

The objective of the Distributed Energy (DE) Programme is to increase the uptake of DE through the development of integrated systems in order to reduce through-life costs, improve ease of installation and increase efficiency in the combined generation of heat and electricity. Within this programme framework the objective of the Macro DE FRP will develop and validate a software methodology to enable the design of optimised DE solutions where clusters of demand sites are linked with appropriate DE supply equipment. The project will quantify the opportunity for Macro level DE (up to 50MW) in GB and the potential to accelerate the development of appropriate technology by 2020 for the purposes of significant implementation by 2030

This executive summary discusses the five work packages and their results in terms of the key outcomes from the project:

1. Evaluation of the potential benefits of system aggregation and optimisation techniques
2. Characterisation of energy demand and supply profiles for typical UK site types (typically 100 kWe – 10 MWe)
3. Development of software methodology which analyses and integrates combinations of sites to enable optimised DE solutions
4. Benefits case for the development of such an approach
5. Identification of the deployment and CO₂ reduction opportunity for macro DE systems

Our answers to the questions focus on the amount and ways that energy is used in the UK. The answers draw on CREDS research and we would be happy to share more details with the Review team.

Reducing the UK's overall energy demand provides a necessary and major contribution to net-zero emissions by 2050 as part of a comprehensive climate plan, with many associated benefits that would improve quality of life for all. Cutting energy use could:deliver around half of UK emissions' reduction by 2050;enhance quality of life, with significant co-benefits that align with other policy objectives (health, biodiversity, affordable warmth);reduce the risks and costs associated with relying on untested, undeveloped technical solutions in energy supply and engineered carbon dioxide removal (CDR, sometimes called geo-engineering).A low energy demand strategy could be at the heart of a fair, affordable and healthy route to net-zero. New research from CREDS (Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions) suggests that it will be difficult and expensive to meet the UK's net-zero target without measures to reduce demand for energy

Without energy demand reduction we will not achieve the UK's Sixth Carbon Budget target in 2035 of 78% below 1990 levels, or our 2050 net-zero target. The UK Government has yet to define how energy demand will contribute to achieving our climate ambitions. Given the evidence presented in this report, it is imperative that the UK Government outline a detailed strategy and supporting policies to enable energy demand reduction to fulfil its necessary role in achieving rapid emissions reductions in the UK. The limited government focus on energy demand has mostly been on improving technology efficiency with little attention to the other mechanisms that involve reducing the need for energy service demands. Reducing energy demand to the extent, and at the speed, that is needed requires both an acceleration in energy efficiency improvement and shifts in the consumption patterns of products and services, travel and diets to avoid the consumption of energy services. None of our Low Energy Demand (LED) scenarios compromise our quality of life. Instead, they seek to enhance it with numerous co-benefits associated with healthier diets, active living, clean air, safe communities, warm homes, rebalancing work and driving down inequality. All this is possible while halving the UK's energy demand

In this policy brief, energy security is defined as 'balancing energy demand with supply', in ways that are reliable, affordable, and sustainable for consumers. The authors' recommendation is to adopt a more proactive and coordinated demand-centred approach - rather than focusing on ensuring supplies to meet 'given' demand levels.

This UKERC Research Landscape provides an overview of the competencies and publicly funded activities in energy efficiency (industry) research, development and demonstration (RD&D) in the UK. It covers the main funding streams, research providers, infrastructure, networks and UK participation in international activities.

UKERC ENERGY RESEARCH LANDSCAPE: ENERGY EFFICIENCY - INDUSTRY

• Section 1: An overview which includes a broad characterisation of research activity in the sector and the key research challenges
• Section 2: An assessment of UK capabilities in relation to wider international activities, in the context of market potential
• Section 3: Major funding streams and providers of basic research along with a brief commentary
• Section 4: Major funding streams and providers of applied research along with a brief commentary
• Section 5: Major funding streams for demonstration activity along with major projects and a brief commentary
• Section 6: Research infrastructure and other major research assets (e.g. databases, models)
• Section 7: Research networks, mainly in the UK, but also European networks not covered by the EU Framework Research and Technology Development (RTD) Programmes
• Section 8: UK participation in energy-related EU Framework Research and Technology Development (RTD) Programmes
• Section 9: UK participation in wider international initiatives, including those supported by the International Energy Agency