The events supported by the EPSRC Supergen Energy Networks Hub include webinars on a range of topics. Recordings of the webinars are available to download following the event.
The Whole Energy Systems Team at Newcastle University have an exciting new list of webinar speakers this Spring. Talks are held late morning (UTC) every other Thursday. Details of speakers and dates are below: please register to join the talks:
“Designing a grid fit for the future: democratising distribution network analysis with an openly accessible online tool and real-world smart meter data.”
31st March (12pm - 1pm UTC)
Dr Liyang Han, Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
“A regression-based data market for energy systems”.
The first session in the series featured speakers from Academia and Industry discussing their career journeys, their challenges and successes from leaving their home countries through to establishing careers in UK Energy. The recorded session is available to view for a limited time:
Speakers from Session 1:
Professsor Jihong Wang - Head of Power and Control Systems Research Laboratory, Warwick University
Professor Zhongdong Wong – Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean, University of Exeter
Dr Panos Papadopolous – Lecturer at Strathclyde University
Dr Richard Oduro – Research Fellow, Leeds University
Dr John Nwobu – Research Engineer, Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult
Speakers: Jethro Browell and Thomas Alexander (University of Strathclyde)
Energy FORecasting and analytics for Market-led Multi-vector networks
Project Summary
EnFORMM will develop forecasting tools for efficient operation of multi-vector energy networks and markets. New methods based on data science and machine learning will be developed to predict electricity and gas market prices and volumes, and to quantify risk. A key aspect of EnFORMM is the explicit consideration of interdependencies between energy vectors. This technology will enhance new and existing business models, such as distributed resource aggregators and heat/energy-as-a-serve, in support of the transition to a zero-carbon energy system. EnFORMM is promoting excellence in UK energy research by supporting outstanding Early Career Researchers at the University of Strathclyde.
The overarching aim of this project is to develop fundamental understanding of the role and impact of thermal energy storage (TES) technologies in future UK low carbon energy networks. The focus of this research will be on advanced TES: latent heat TES based on phase change materials (PCMs) and reversible reaction based thermochemical storage (TST). We will investigate the role, environmental impacts and value of TES in future heat and electricity networks, facilitating TES technological development, business models and inform key decision makers.
The ever increasing integration of variable output renewable energy sources (mainly wind and solar) as well as various other power electronic interfaced devices (e.g. electric vehicles, HVDC interconnectors, potentially battery storage, heat pumps, etc.) to achieve decarbonisation targets, significantly increases the uncertainty and complexity in the dynamic behaviour of electrical power systems. Machine learning has shown great potential in dealing with complex nonlinear systems in various domains. This project envisions bringing together the artificial intelligence and power engineering research communities to work on the very computationally demanding and complex problem of representing the power system dynamic behaviour.
This session is now available to view. Please use passcode:$cjzw5j5
Speaker: Professor Kerstin Eder (Bristol University)
Abstract:
Energy efficiency is now a major, if not the major, constraint in electronic systems engineering. Significant progress has been made in low power hardware design for several decades. The potential for savings is now far greater at the higher levels of abstraction in the system stack. The greatest savings are expected from energy consumption-aware software. Promoting energy efficiency to a first class software design goal is therefore an urgent research challenge.
Designing software for energy efficiency requires visibility of energy consumption from the hardware, where the energy is consumed, all the way through to the programs that ultimately control what the hardware does.
This visibility is termed energy transparency. Energy transparency enables a deeper understanding of how algorithms and coding impact on the energy consumption of a computation when executed on hardware. It is a key prerequisite for informed design space exploration and helps system designers to find the optimal trade-off between performance, accuracy, security and energy consumption of a computation.
In this seminar I will outline recent research advances that will give "more power" to software developers. We will investigate why software is key to energy efficient computing, what energy transparency is, how to monitor and measure the energy consumed by software, how to model energy consumption at different abstraction levels, how data affects the energy consumption of a computation, and how to statically estimate the energy consumed by software.
Bio:
Kerstin Eder is Professor of Computer Science and heads the Trustworthy Systems Laboratory (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/tsl) at the University of Bristol, UK. She also leads the research theme on Verification and Validation for Safety in Robots at the Bristol Robotics Lab. Her research is focused on specification, verification and analysis techniques that allow engineers to design a system and to verify or explore its behaviour in terms of functional correctness, security, performance and energy efficiency. Kerstin has gained extensive experience of verifying complex microelectronic designs while working with leading semiconductor design and Electronic Design Automation companies. In her research she seeks novel techniques and fundamental theoretical contributions to achieve solutions that make a difference in practice. Kerstin is a Royal Academy of Engineering ‘Excellence in Engineering’ prize winner. She holds a PhD in Computational Logic, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and an MEng in Informatics.
South Asian countries such as India, Nepal and Bhutan are currently developing plans for increasing renewable energy penetration. However, other rapidly developing countries, such as Bangladesh, appear to be moving towards a fossil fuel-based model of development. Recent policy change in India has opened the avenue towards regional energy collaboration between Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Bhutan. The objective of this research is to explore the potential of electricity import from India, Nepal and Bhutan from renewables to aid the decarbonisation of Bangladesh’s rapidly accelerating electricity sector.
This session is available to view, please use passcode: R5@Kskd1
Project Summary
The project will investigate the electricity network infrastructure for the electrification of airports with electric aircrafts (EAs) and electric vehicles (EVs). The project aims to include electrified aviation into a whole energy systems approach. An electricity network model will be developed for airports, by considering temporal power consumption, and charging requirements of EAs and EVs. Electricity network operating strategies will be studied with electric charging schemes, and to explore airport energy networks that interact with power girds. A feasibility study will be conducted to investigate demand side response through ‘airport to grid’ using aggregated EAs and EVs.
This session is available to view, please use passcode: T9@ZV8CQ
Project Summary
Recent advances in data analytics of energy system highlight the need to collect large volume of data, which causes concerns over privacy and security. Existing protection schemes, such as encryption, can not address the privacy concerns over the lifetime of the data, as evidenced by the data breach of British Airways. This project aims to explore and expand a new concept of differential privacy, recently developed in data science, into the energy system and develop a novel consumer-centric privacy-preserving mechanism that provides tailored protection for consumer-chosen sensitive information, while minimising the utility loss of the data.
Speaker: Camilla Thomson and James Robertson (Edinburgh University)
The recording of the webinar is available to view, please use passcode: Mum57aw@
Project Summary
There is some evidence that hybrid heating systems - heat pumps coupled with conventional technologies - can achieve significant carbon reductions when actively-controlled. There is a need, however, to better understand the interdependencies between this hybrid heating and the wider energy system of different vectors at different scales. Also, the consequential impacts of hybrid heating on network constraints and regional, time-varying, marginal carbon emissions needs to be identified. This project addresses these by soft-linking dispatch models across scales and vectors with carbon analysis to examine the opportunities and costs of emissions-led dispatch of hybrid heating.
Early Career Researcher: Cross- Hub Webinar Series
Following on from the success of the 2020 Supergen ECR Cross Hub webinar series, the Supergen Hubs have started a new series of webinars for 2021. This is a great chance to see what research is happening across the whole Supergen network and potentially find some new opportunities for cross-hub collaboration.
The first session was held in March and further sessions are planned throughout the year. For more information please contact the ECR committee members.
All sessions are recorded and available to view on the youtube website.
Session 1: Current ECR Research within Supergen Hubs (March 3rd 2021)
A series of webinars providing an introduction to vehicle to grid (V2G) and smart charging projects and topics, with invited guest speakers from institutions in the UK and overseas.