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.

Energy storage is more important today than at any time in human history. It has a vital role to play in storing electricity from renewable sources (wind, wave, solar) and is key to the electrification of transport. However, current energy storage technologies are not fit for purpose. No single energy storage technology can meet the needs of all applications, but many of the research challenges to improve performance and reduce costs are common across electrochemical, mechanical and thermal devices: new materials need to be developed and tested, thermodynamic processes have to be optimized, and lab-based prototypes must be suitable for scale-up. These technologies have to be integrated into robust and cost effective systems. In response to the situation, especially within the UK context, we propose to establish a SUPERGEN Energy Storage Hub. The consortium will bring together investigators with strong international and national reputations in energy storage research and spanning the entire value chain from the energy storage technologies themselves, through manufacturing, integration, and evaluation of the whole system in which the energy storage would be embedded. The consortium will address a number of the critical barriers that face progress towards the commercialisation of energy storage and its widespread exploitation in the UK and elsewhere. Members of the consortium cover areas in which the UK has both the scientific capability and an energy system need. The activities will embrace energy policy, as well as a roadmap and a vision for energy storage research in the UK stretching into the future, thus setting the agenda for UK energy storage. Through extensive networking, including strong engagement with all stakeholders in industry, NGOs and government the hub will not only remain informed and inform others about the latest developments in energy storage it will also bring the energy storage community in the UK as a whole closer together and through wide dissemination engage the public. Through the strength of the Hub and its links will come more effective pathways for the exploitation of new research and new ideas in commercial products.