• Energy Research
• 2025-2025close
• 2025 close

This project studies the dynamic response characteristic of the thermal energy storage (TES) coupled with the district heating network (DHN) and the innovative active control technology for the indoor thermal comfort with efficient load matching. Therefore, this study will develop a more accurate spatiotemporal dynamic simulation model for the TES-DHN emphasizing the thermal inertia and time-delay properties. The research will also develop an active control technology and optimization tool from the viewpoint of system design and operation to match the heat supply and demand more accurately. Moreover, reasonable experimental tests and case studies will also be designed and implemented to validate the developed methods and to disseminate research outcomes. Overall, this project will contribute new scientific findings and efficient engineering tools for active load matching in order to further improve energy efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions while improving the indoor thermal comfort.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is becoming a major source of renewable energy around the globe, with the International Energy Agency predicting it to be the largest contributor to renewables by 2024. This uptake is driven by the building of large PV power plants in regions of high solar resource, and also by the deployment of so-called distributed PV on the roofs of homes and industrial sites. The dominant PV technology to date has been based upon the crystalline semiconductor silicon. The production of silicon PV panels has been commoditised for large-scale manufacturing with costs reducing by a factor of ten in under a decade. Our research addresses the next generation of printed PV technologies which could deliver solar energy with far greater functional and processing flexibility than c-Si or traditional compound semiconductors, enabling tuneable design to meet the requirements of market applications inaccessible to current PV technologies. In particular, we seek to advance photovoltaics based upon organic and perovskite semiconductors - materials which can be processed from solution into the simplest possible solar cell structures, hence reducing cost and embodied energy from the manufacturing. These new technologies are still in the early stages of development with many fundamental scientific and engineering challenges still to be addressed. These challenges will be the foci of our research agenda, as will the development of solar cells for specific applications for which there is currently no optimal technological solution, but which need attributes such as light weight, flexible form factor, tuned spectral response or semi-transparency. These are unique selling points of organic and perovskite solar PV but fall outside the performance (and often cost) windows of the traditional technologies. Our specific target sectors are power for high value communications (for example battery integratable solar cells for unmanned aerial vehicles), and improved energy and resource efficiency power for the built environment (including solar windows and local for 'internet of things' devices). In essence we seek to extend the reach and application of PV beyond the provision of stationary energy. To deliver our ambitious research and technology development agenda we have assembled three world-renowned groups in next generation PV researchers at Swansea University, Imperial College London and Oxford University. All are field leaders and the assembled team spans the fundamental and applied science and engineering needed to answer both the outstanding fundamental questions and reduce the next generation PV technology to practise. Our research programme called Application Targeted Integrated Photovoltaics also involves industrial partners from across the PV supply chain - early manufacturers of the PV technology, component suppliers and large end users who understand the technical and cost requirements to deliver a viable product. The programme is primarily motivated by the clear need to reduce CO2 emissions across our economies and societies and our target sectors are of high priority and potential in this regard. It is also important for the UK to maintain an internationally competitive capability (and profile) in the area of next generation renewables. As part of our agenda we will be ensuring the training of scientists and engineers equipped with the necessary multi-disciplinary skills and closely connected to the emerging industry and its needs to ensure the UK stays pre-eminent in next generation photovoltaics.

The OYSTER project will lead to the development and demonstration of a marinized electrolyser designed for integration with offshore wind turbines. Stiesdal will work with the world’s largest offshore wind developer (Ørsted) and a leading wind turbine manufacturer (Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy) to develop and test in a shoreside pilot trial a MW-scale fully marinized electrolyser. The findings will inform studies and design exercises for full-scale systems that will include innovations to reduce costs while improving efficiency. To realise the potential of offshore hydrogen production there is a need for compact electrolysis systems that can withstand harsh offshore environments and have minimal maintenance requirements while still meeting cost and performance targets that will allow production of low-cost hydrogen. The project will provide a major advance towards this aim. Preparation for further offshore testing of wind-hydrogen systems will be undertaken, and results from the studies will be disseminated in a targeted way to help advance the sector and prepare the market for deployment at scale. The OYSTER project partners share a vision of hydrogen being produced from offshore wind at a cost that is competitive with natural gas (with a realistic carbon tax), thus unlocking bulk markets for green hydrogen (heat, industry, and transport), making a meaningful impact on CO2 emissions, and facilitating the transition to a fully renewable energy system in Europe. This project is a key first step on the path to developing a commercial offshore hydrogen production industry and will lead to innovations with significant exploitation potential within Europe and beyond.

Lime is one of the earliest industrial commodities known to man and it continues to be one of the essential building blocks of modern Society. The global lime market is anticipated to approach the value of 44 Billion Euros by the end of 2026 and resulting in various growth opportunities for key players. The SUBLime network aims to develop the most advanced technology in lime-based materials modelling and characterization for industrial use that will go beyond the limitations of existing solutions in new construction and conservation in the built heritage. It is firstly dedicated to recruit and train fifteen PhD students in multiple scientific and engineering fields towards a better understanding and development of sustainable innovations in both added functionalities and sustainability aspects in lime mortars and plasters, strongly based on novel biomimetic and closed-loop recycling approaches. The project covers the main features of lime-based applications analysis, including material characterization, numer

WHO WE ARE? BERIDI is a spin-out company of Berenguer Ingenieros, founded in 2018, as the division of the group specialized in the offshore wind energy sector. Our group is a leading seashore engineering firm, which has worked in more than 1,200 projects in Spain and LATAM, including + 40 multimillion projects. THE PROBLEM: EU must install 230-450 GW new offshore capacity before 2050 to fulfil the Green Deal Goals. but current space available in shallow imposes a limit of 112 GW. Only new floating platforms can help EU fulfil its objectives, but the installation of floating turbines is still technically challenging, very expensive and highly time-consuming, especially for the largest turbines (>15 MW). THE SOLUTION: We have patented a new floating technology that enables the safest and most efficient (time, costs and performance) installation of turbines in deep waters. ARCHIME3 is, to the best of our knowledge, the only technology today that will enable the installation of the largest turbines (15-20 MW) in deep waters in an efficient and safe manner. MARKET OPPORTUNITY: The market opportunity at a global level for now to 2030, reaches more than €20 Billion. Just by achieving a market penetration of 10%, our market opportunity can reach €2 Billion from now until 2030. Our financial projections for 2026, when we expect to have installed our first wind farm (400 MW), would mean €44M of cumulated turnover, €20M of cumulated EBIDTA and close to €240M of company value, meaning a x13 ROI for the investment (2.4 M Grant + 4.8 M equity) requested to the EIC for this project.

Wind energy currently produces 18% of the UK's power but, in a drive towards a de-carbonised economy by 2050, this proportion must increase substantially over the next decade. The UK government has committed to increase offshore wind power capacity by 1-2 GW per year until 2030, reflecting the fact that the country contains some of the best locations for offshore wind in Europe. As the UK becomes more reliant upon wind energy, it is of increasing importance to improve both the efficiency and reliability of wind farms. Since wind turbines which lie in the wakes of upstream machines produce less power and experience higher fatigue loading than those upstream, there is scope to achieve this goal by improving our ability to predict the wakes generated by wind turbines and thereby design an optimally laid out wind farm given knowledge of the prevailing wind conditions. Our ability to optimise wind farms is currently hampered by an over-reliance on out-of-date empiricism. This proposal seeks to rectify this by developing physics-based modelling tools to better describe individual wind-turbine wakes as well as the interactions between interacting wakes within a wind farm. Offshore wind farms are particularly amenable to optimisation due to the stability of the prevailing wind conditions in comparison to onshore sites. Optimal spacing of wind turbines revolves around several factors. These are the desire to produce as much power as possible from a given site whilst at the same time minimising maintenance costs in response to fatigue damage caused by turbines sitting in the highly unsteady, turbulent wake of an upstream machine. This requires confident prediction of the spreading of wind turbine wakes plus a methodology to estimate the fatigue lifetime of wind turbine components in response to their predicted inflow conditions. In addition, there is the problem of predicting the global blockage in which the wind farm as a whole has the effect of diverting the wind over/around the wind farm meaning that the true inflow wind speed to the farm is not the same as the prevailing wind. Specifically, we will: 1. Perform innovative experiments in order to better understand the flow physics underpinning the spreading of turbulent wakes. This will involve exploring the interactions in the near wake between the coherence introduced at multiple length scales simultaneously by, for example, the tower, nacelle and blade-tip vortices. In addition we will explore the physics behind the spreading of the produced wake due to the phenomenon of entrainment, which is the process by which mass/energy is transferred from the background into the wake. In particular we will focus on the effect of atmospheric, and wake, turbulence on entrainment. 2. Take this new physical understanding and translate it into a physics-based model for the spreading of an individual wind-turbine wake. 3. Devise a methodology to make accurate predictions for the fatigue lifetime of vulnerable wind-turbine components (e.g. the gear box/trailing edge bond etc.) in response to the fluctuating inflow caused by atmospheric/wake turbulence. 4. Produce a model to correct for the global blockage that an entire wind farm represents to the oncoming wind. 5. Finally, develop a low-cost, physics-based wind farm optimisation tool and disseminate it to the UK's wind-energy sector. The model will take as inputs the details of the turbines to be erected, the atmospheric conditions at the specified site and the agreed strike price/MWh to be paid for the generated power. The output will be the optimal number and layout of wind turbines for an efficient offshore wind farm. We have attracted three partners from across the wind-energy sector who will play a vital role in ensuring that the output of this research is disseminated to the key stakeholders in the UK in a form that can be implemented by the industry straight away.