Energy Research Two-Day Conference

Thursday 3 and Friday 4 April 2014, The Open University, Walton Hall,  Milton Keynes.

Where available, slides for the presentations may be obtained from the presentation title and a photograph of the presenter may be obtained from their name.

Programme 

Thursday, 3 April

1.30  Welcome from Helen Sharp (Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology, The Open University)

1.40 Roger Bentley (University of Reading)  Peak oil, and other global energy limits

2.20 Leon Di Marco (FSK Technology Research)  Energy storage in carbon neutral fuels

3.00 Robina Hetherington (The Open University) Energy in buildings: the convergent imperatives of BEM and BIM

3.20 Jacky Bourgeois (The Open University) Conversations with my washing machine: an in-the-wild study of demand shifting with self-generated energy 

3.40 Tea and Coffee

4.10 Richard Snape (De Montfort University) Modelling households as adopters of smart grid technology using agent-based modelling

4.40 Danica Greetham (University of Reading) Agent based modelling of long term individual load forecasts scenarios

5.00 William Nuttall (The Open University)  Fuel panics: insights from spatial agent-based simulation

5.30 Close 

6.30/7.00 Dinner  

 

Friday, 4 April

9.20 Welcome to second day

9.30 Rupert Gammon (De Montfort University) Cross-sectoral integration through smart energy systems

10.10 Vijay Pakka (De Montfort University) Smart grids: technologies, markets and communities

10.40 Rui Carvalho (University of Cambridge) Resilience of natural gas networks during conflicts, crises and disruptions

11.20 Tea and Coffee

11.50 Ben Mestel (The Open University)  Optimal battery charge/discharge strategies for consumers and suppliers

12.10 Ellen Webborn (Warwick University & National Grid)  The potential value of energy storage as a provider of multiple balancing services

12.30 Lunch

1.30 Zofia Lukszo (Technical University of Delft) Electric mobility in future energy systems

2.10 Stan Zachary (Heriot Watt University)  Roles of energy storage in balancing power networks

2.50  Tea and Coffee

3.20 Kumar Patchigolla and Stuart Wagland (Cranfield University)  Energy research at Cranfield: four years overview

3.50 Concluding remarks

4.00  Close

Speakers, titles and abstracts

Roger Bentley (University of Reading)   Peak oil, and other global energy limits
The world contains very large resources of energy, and mankind can use much lower amounts of energy than currently for the same outputs. But we face some very tough energy limits. These are: peak conventional oil, about now; peak conventional gas in a decade or so; possibly peak conventional coal; a much lower energy return from most new fossil and non-fossil energies; a net-energy rate limit that will constrain energy transitions; the impact of high energy costs on global economic activity; and climate change limits on the use of fossil fuels. The talk will discuss these limits, and indicate the modelling needed if our future energy choices are to be understood.

Jacky Bourgeois (The Open University)  Conversations with my washing machine: an in-the-wild study of demand shifting with self-generated energy
Distributed micro-generation is considered one of the cornerstones of the future energy infrastructure and residential energy generation using solar panels, wind turbine, etc. has become a feasible option for most house owners. Yet practical savings fall far short of this target for three reasons: (a) residential energy production and consumption are out of sync, (b) the practice of turning self-generated energy into money via feed-in tariffs essentially makes energy production invisible (c) and the available of seemingly free energy (after investment) undermines attempts to use feedback mechanisms to change people's energy behaviour in a positive way. Past research has focused on energy demand reduction, looking at the technological, human and social issues. In contrast, energy generation has not yet been a focus of investigation in computing and human computer interaction research. An empirical study will be presented to explore energy demand-shifting, a potential solution to optimize the use of energy in the context of residential solar generation. Participatory data analysis and in-home prototyping such as text messages and washing machine control have been used to build a better understanding of how to support people increasing benefits of their solar panels for money, convenience and environment.

Rui Carvalho (University of Cambridge)  Resilience of natural gas networks during conflicts, crises and disruptions
Human conflict, geopolitical crises, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters can turn large parts of energy distribution networks offline. Europe's current gas supply network is largely dependent on deliveries from Russia and North Africa, creating vulnerabilities to social and political instabilities. During crises, less delivery may mean greater congestion, as the pipeline network is used in ways it has not been designed for. Given the importance of the security of natural gas supply, we develop a model to handle network congestion on various geographical scales. We offer a resilient response strategy to energy shortages and quantify its effectiveness for a variety of relevant scenarios. In essence, Europe's gas supply can be made robust even to major supply disruptions, if a fair distribution strategy is applied.

Robina Hetherington (The Open University) Energy in buildings: the convergent imperatives of BEM and BIM
There is a convergence between UK legislative policies on BEM [Building Energy Modelling] and BIM [Building Information Modelling]. As a result significant research opportunities lie with the creation of tools to handle these changes in building design requirements and reduce the energy used in buildings.
    This presentation defines briefly these different technologies and describes early work in the definition of a toolset to assist architects in the design of low energy, non-domestic buildings. The approach would support a ‘designerly’ approach, yet provide an information rich model of the building throughout the design, construction, commissioning and maintenance phases of the building project.  This would be achieved by the composition of the building model as a series of ‘Intelligent Spaces’.  The Intelligent Spaces would be abstract volumes, enclosed by zero thickness surfaces, which have data and rules attached.
    The novel feature of the proposal is that it maintains both an abstract and detailed version of the building model through all stages of the building design and use.  Key features of the proposed software are: 1) the ability to move iteratively between sketch and detailed design to explore different approaches to the building form and construction, 2) the setting and monitoring of relevant energy targets throughout the different building design stages and 3) the integration of an advisory system linked to energy targets to support decision making.

Leon Di Marco (FSK Technology Research)  Energy storage in carbon neutral fuels
Converting  wind and solar power into carbon based renewable fuels for transport and power is a useful alternative to storing  electric energy in batteries , flywheels, hydro, compressed air or hydrogen.  The current energy infrastructure for liquid and gaseous fuels can be retained indefinitely to be used with advanced hybridised vehicles in all sectors apart from planes.   The power sector and domestic heating can be decarbonised using the Power2Gas concept of making renewable methane. The economic advantage of decarbonising without the need to extensively electrify the transport and power sector appears to be compelling.  Techniques for creating renewable fuels from carbon dioxide and water are discussed with some recent work on the use of these fuels to decarbonise a large UK fleet of 10 million hybrids cars by 2030.    

Rupert Gammon (De Montfort University) Cross-sectoral integration through smart energy systems
The increasing use of low-carbon energy generators is demanding more intelligence in energy systems.  One reason for this is that most such power sources suffer from poor dispatchability of output (i.e. they are not good at responding to changes in power demand).  Storing electricity may appear to be an obvious answer to this problem, but it is technically and economically challenging, especially over diurnal, and longer, periods.  A broader approach to energy storage is more promising, whereby – once stored – the energy is not returned to the electricity grid, but is used in, what are conventionally, the heat and transport sectors.  This provides a large demand-side response capability that enables power balancing on electricity networks while simultaneously decarbonising the other sectors.  Much of this can be accomplished with little reliance on behaviour change in consumers, which is notoriously hard to achieve.  Such an approach is particularly ‘smart’ in that it unlocks symbiotic potentials between sectors that lead to major gains in technical and economic efficiency.

Danica Greetham (University of Reading)  Agent based modelling of long term individual load forecasts scenarios
One of the aims of the New Thames Valley Vision project is to understand the impact of low carbon technologies (LCTs) on the low voltage (LV) networks using long term (scenario driven) forecasts of household level demand. Not only may uptake rates of these LCTs vary, but it is likely that uptake will be clustered on the same LV networks due to similar demographics (similar people live down similar streets), influence between neighbours and social factors such as “keeping up with the Jones". In this part of the TVV project, in order to model long term individual loads under different scenarios, we take an agent based modelling approach. The preliminary results show that under a clustered uptake assumption, electrical vehicles impact might be felt on substations level faster than predicted by government scenarios.

Zofia Lukszo (Technical University of Delft) Electric mobility in future energy systems
Electric vehicles have a huge potential to play an important role in future energy systems to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources. However, because a high penetration of renewable energy sources weakens the correlation between wholesale electricity prices and network demand, cost-minimizing electric vehicles may cause high peaks in network load. A solution can be found in an advance capacity allocation. Moreover, the objectives of using the  EVs flexibility vary for different actors in the system: consumers (represented by an aggregator), distribution network operators and e.g. wind power producers. The results show that the three different perspectives lead to different EV demand profiles, which are also further influenced by the electricity tariff structures.

Ben Mestel (The Open University)  Optimal battery charge/discharge strategies for consumers and suppliers
Variational methods provide a general  framework to investigate  optimal consumer strategies for the charge/discharge of storage batteries (e.g. in electric vehicles connected to the grid) and for electricity suppliers to adjust prices to motivate desired consumer behaviour. This talk illustrates these ideas with a simple model of a single price-taking consumer connecting a storage battery to the grid.

William Nuttall (The Open University)  Fuel panics: insights from spatial agent-based simulation
Professor Nuttall will present work undertaken with Eben Upton and recently published in the IEEE journal Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. The context for the work is that the  United Kingdom has twice suffered major disruptions as a result of fuel panics, first in September 2000, coincident with a wave of fuel protests, and, more recently, in March 2012, following political warnings of a possible future supply chain disruption. In each case, the disruption and economic consequences were serious. Upton and Nuttall demonstrate that agent-based techniques offer a powerful framework for simulation of supply chains and consumers under conditions of transient demand. In the case of fuel panic crisis, we show that even a highly abstract model can reproduce a range of transient phenomena seen in the real world and present a set of practical recommendations for policymakers faced with panic buying.

Vijay Pakka (De Montfort University) Smart grids: technologies, markets and communities
The smart grid revolution has been multi-dimensional and sustaining given the rapid advances in technologies, market structures and levels of participation by various stakeholders. Though some of the traditional technologies are still used albeit in an upgraded version, the processes by which they are managed have made substantial progress, both at the transmission and distribution levels. On the other hand, consumer participation is ever increasing with penetration of accessible technologies such as smart meters, EVs, mini DGs, and changes to processes that encourage their participation in the market. Additionally, Electricity Market Reform (EMR) has various implications to UK’s energy security and market competitiveness, not to mention throwing up some serious questions on the way electricity is traded in the future. In this talk we shall look at some of these issues and the challenges in tackling them and highlight some of the real projects in Europe and elsewhere. We also present a few results from the CASCADE and AMEN projects undertaken at De Montfort University.

Kumar Patchigolla and Stuart Wagland (Cranfield University)  Energy research at Cranfield: four years overview
Cranfield University have a long history of energy research, particularly in the fields of coal as a fuel, combustion, gasification and materials for energy applications. For the past 4 years Cranfield University have undertaken a vast amount of practical research spanning energy from waste and biomass through gasification, combustion and anaerobic digestion, carbon capture and storage and waste/fuel characterisation. The projects have been funded by the Energy Technologies Institute [ETI], Department of Energy and Climate Change [DECC], Technology Strategy Board [TSB] and Research Councils UK [RCUK]. Here we present the lessons learned over the past 4 years, and discuss the future of energy research in the UK.

Richard Snape (De Montfort University) Modelling households as adopters of smart grid technology using Agent-based Modelling
This presentation gives an overview of Agent-based Modelling (ABM) as a modelling technique and its applications in modelling the electricity supply system. The talk discusses prior applications of the ABM technique before describing a recently developed ABM framework (CASCADE - http://rsnape.github.io/CASCADE/docs/html/index.html) with a focus on whole-system approaches to modelling the (mainly UK) electricity network and its transition to a smart grid. I will present a number of particular models developed using the CASCADE framework - focusing particularly on the adoption of distributed generation (in this case, PV) as well as an operational microgrid scenario. The two examples illustrate the use of CASCADE at different timescales. Finally, I will consider the suitability of ABM for giving insight into different questions and the qualitative interpretation of quantitative outputs.

Ellen Webborn (University of Warwick and National Grid) The potential value of energy storage as a provider of multiple balancing services
With an increase in the amount of renewable power generation in the UK and a reduction in the proportion of traditional synchronous generators, the task of balancing the electricity grid is becoming increasingly challenging. An energy storage facility could potentially provide multiple types of service to the grid, thus increasing its value beyond what would be possible from price arbitrage alone. Here I outline the project I’m starting in this area in collaboration with National Grid, which will form part of my PhD. I shall describe the objectives and expected approaches, and welcome further discussion.

Stan Zachary (Heriot Watt University)  Roles of energy storage in balancing power networks
Electric power networks require that supply and demand be kept balanced on a minute-by-minute basis.  Storage, which may be regarded as shifting energy through time, is able to assist in this process by (a) smoothing predicted imbalances, such as between known times of high and low demand, (b) buffering against sudden and unpredicted variations in either supply or demand.  Typically the economic use of storage requires that it is simultaneously able to provide both these (and often also other) services.  We discuss an integrated mathematical framework for optimal control of such storage and for the determination of its economic value. We discuss also possible extensions to the time-shifting of demand.

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