Decarbonising the energy system in many countries (including both China and the UK) is likely to involve the large-scale deployment of renewable electricity generators with intermittent output and the electrification of energy services such as heat and transport that have very low load factors. These changes in electricity supply and demand will lead to a great need for energy storage. Our work for the Carbon Trust has estimated that the effective deployment of energy storage in the UK could reduce the cost of a low-carbon electricity system by £15 billion in 2030. The deployment and operation of storage is a complex task, since it can provide many different services, including energy arbitrage (buying off-peak and selling at higher peak prices), energy reserves, resolving transmission and distribution constraints and improving system reliability. The weight placed on each of these could affect the pattern of investment, and sophisticated planning tools are required to ensure that optimal decisions can be taken. We will improve these tools so that we can accurately represent a variety of storage systems. Much of the existing work on storage assumes that it might be used simply to postpone the "like for like" replacement of network assets that would otherwise be overloaded, but we will consider more radical options, using storage to actively manage the distribution network as part of the broader smart grid. We can use our models to calculate the economic value of energy storage when it provides a range of services to network companies and system users. We will measure the option value of having a storage system that can be deployed in much less time than it takes to get consent to build a transmission line, adding flexibility in how we respond to uncertainty over the future evolution of the energy system. It is important that such decisions are made on the basis of appropriate models, capable of quantifying the wide range of services that storage can provide, taking account of the way that electricity generation and demand varies over the course of the day and the year, and measuring the impact of transmission and distribution network effects. It is important to recognise that many countries (including the UK) have liberalised their electricity industries, and storage will only be pursued if companies believe that a viable business case exists. Work has started (via the Low Carbon Networks Fund) to test particular business models for demonstration projects, but this needs to be generalised. We will provide a quantified assessment of whether there is a business case for energy storage at present, and of what needs to be done to create one. This will involve a detailed study of the contracts that would be written around electricity storage, drawing lessons from existing arrangements for other kinds of storage, such as for gas or agricultural commodities. We will study how the rules of the electricity market could affect the choices of storage and generation technology. We will ask what policies are needed to ensure that storage can be economically viable when sensibly deployed and operated. We will identify technology policies that can help move energy storage from prototypes to large scale deployment. International transmission may complement energy storage within a country, and we will assess the potentially conflicting incentives if neighbouring countries adopt different strategies for dealing with intermittency. Too many debates around energy policy today are based on assertions without sufficient evidence. The models that we will develop, and the analysis that we will perform, will provide numerical estimates of the effectiveness of a range of policies, allowing regulators and other policy-makers to choose options that will lead to decarbonisation in the most effective way.

Energy storage is an essential technology for balancing the differences in supply and demand in a sustainable power network reliant on intermittent renewable generation. Energy can be stored as electricity, as heat and chemically in a sustainable fuel and at different temporal and size scales. Short time variations in the power grid can be effectively managed using batteries but the battery technologies are too expensive for servicing the bulk long term storage requirements to balance variations in demand between seasons and extended periods of low renewable generation. Technologies with a slower response, lower round trip efficiency but lower capital base are preferred for these applications. Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) is a long duration storage technology being developed by Highview Power. Energy is stored thermally in three ways; as cold in liquid air and in a backed bed regenerator cold store and as heat in a molten salt hot store. An air liquefier is used to charge the LARS device. LAES has a sweet spot at large (>50MW) scale as plant efficiency increases and relative cost reduces with scale for this technology. But what would happen if a LAES plant could be efficiently deployed at smaller (<50MW) scale? The technology could then be integrated with other aspects of the energy network that require cooling at cryogenic temperatures such as the long term storage of bio methane and green hydrogen. In this project, we will investigate the integration of a small to mid scale LAES plant with the liquefaction of locally produced bio methane from waste, such as agriculture, managed grass land (such as parks and sports fields) and sewerage. Similarly, hydrogen produced by small to mid size electrolysers connected to local renewable generators requires a storage solution. We propose cold, pressurised storage of hydrogen at 80-90K which lowers the pressure required to store the gas (for an equivalent energy density) by a factor of 2 to 3 and avoids the high energy cost of cryogenic storage at 20K. Integration of LAES with methane and hydrogen storage opens up new revenue steams and shifts the economics to favour smaller plant serving local communities such as large farms, local authorities and water companies managing sewage waste. We propose a local rather than central solution as (a) the feedstocks for bio-methane production have a low energy density to local production and storage avoids transportation inefficiencies (b) Similarly local production and consumption of hydrogen avoids the need to move cold pressurised gas to bulk storage facilities and then to consumers and (c) imbedding the core electrical energy storage of the LAES plant closer to the end user has benefits in reducing the load on the transmission network.

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 decarbonisation of industrial clusters is of critical importance to the UK's ambitions of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The UK Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge (IDC) of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) aims to establish the world's first net-zero carbon industrial cluster by 2040 and at least one low-carbon cluster by 2030. The Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC) has been formed to support this Challenge through funding a multidisciplinary research and innovation centre, which currently does not exist at the scale, to accelerate decarbonisation of industrial clusters. IDRIC works with academia, industry, government and other stakeholders to deliver the multidisciplinary research and innovation agenda needed to decarbonise the UK's industrial clusters. IDRIC's research and innovation programme is delivered through a range of activities that enable industry-led, multidisciplinary research in cross-cutting areas of technology, policy, economics and regulation. IDRIC connects and empowers the UK industrial decarbonisation community to deliver an impactful innovation hub for industrial decarbonisation. The establishment of IDRIC as the "one stop shop" for research and innovation, as well as knowledge exchange, regulation, policy and key skills will be beneficial across the industry sectors and clusters. In summary, IDRIC will connect stakeholders, inspire and deliver innovation and maximise impact to help the UK industrial clusters to grow our existing energy intensive industrial sectors, and to attract new, advanced manufacturing industries of the future.

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.