Community Energy Literature Review

A recent document described UK policy on the use of artificial intelligence in the reduction of carbon emissions ( BEIS, 2022). This involves co-funding a ‘virtual centre of excellence on AI innovation and decarbonisation’ and funding projects ‘which further the development of AI technologies to support decarbonisation’. Comment on the document noted the increasing use of AI tools to ‘solve some of society’s current and future challenges’, and referred to the UK’s National AI Strategy. It also noted that while ‘AI has great potential, it can also cause harm’, and referenced the ‘AI Bill of Rights’ proposed for the USA (E&T, 2022). The two themes of UK AI strategy and global concern over the use of AI will be developed below. The UK’s National AI Strategy outlined a ‘ten-year plan to make Britain a global AI superpower’ and foresaw a profound impact by AI on the UK and the wider world during that period (BEIS 2021). The document referred to earlier initiatives such as the 2017 Indu...

Open Knowledge Maps provide an interesting approach to the structure of a topic. Here is an example providing an overview of research on “decarbonising the uk”. Retrieved from https://openknowledgemaps.org/map/577ce977f89d6b5b48d7e75f5841e80c/  [26 Jul 2018].

The Energy Systems Catapult offers a free data search resource called the Energy Knowledge Exchange - see https://es.catapult.org.uk/projects/energy-knowledge-exchange/ This facility differs from an academic search engine such as Google Scholar: it is subject specific, being “designed to meet the needs of energy innovators”, and rather than returning references to research papers, its response to a search term is to return information under several different headings, such as web pages, projects, data, innovators, funding sources, related events and local – a further search opportunity for material related to selected geographic areas.   There is a browser extension version available for Chrome and Firefox.

A workshop on Regulating the Energy Sector  was held in Bristol on 13th July as part of the HoSEM project. The research team expect to publish workshop outcomes in a few weeks, but these notes indicate some of the questions discussed. The challenges in today’s energy market . Regulation and legislation applied to peer-to-peer (P2P) trading; buying and selling energy, data storage and protection, platform technology, supply and provision rights, consumer and climate protection, energy security. Whose is the responsibility for driving energy regulation? The regulation of new partnerships in the energy market. The implications of making data on energy generation and distribution public through distributed ledger technology. Preferential Policies Which energy system trends does UK regulation favour? Does it favour centralised low-carbon generation? Under what circumstances might it favour P2P trading? The future of P2P trading Will P2P trading be outsourced to...

Some preliminary results are available from the  Household-Supplier Energy Market (HoSEM) project , mentioned in earlier posts, and are described in  “Goal-based automation of peer-to-peer electricity trading”. A broad view of the underlying technology is offered in “Review of Blockchain Technology and its Expectations: Case of the Energy Sector” Both papers can be accessed at https://www.researchgate.net/project/P2P-Energy-Trading-for-Renewables The HoSEM project is now the subject of a discussion group on the Community Energy England Hub website, at http://hub.communityenergyengland.org/projects/136/

'Refactoring Energy Systems' is a research fellowship related to the HoSEM project described in an earlier post. Its grant application details can be viewed at http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/R007373/1 In brief, the fellowship aims to transform how the energy system is viewed, managed and evolved: moving away from the current perception of a single, uniform system across the whole of the UK, to that of localised, adaptive, largely self-reliant system-of-systems. In this new setting, the local systems will each be individually optimised, yet globally connected. To enable this locally optimised and globally connected energy system, the fellowship will deliver a set of system refactoring patterns, tools, and techniques. Refactoring is a disciplined approach to gradually changing the internal structure of an existing system without changing its externally useful services.  The project runs from 2017 to 2022.      

The summary of the HoSEM project in the previous post might prompt questions from CE workers. Some are suggested below, with answers from the Grant Application Form (GAF), and further comments. (GAF:    http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/P031838/1 ) Who are the interested parties? Apart from the university researchers, the GAF names EDF Energy as a partner. Comment: this British energy company is owned by the French EDF (Électricité de France), which is itself state-owned and has world-wide interests. This raises the issue of how closely the HoSEM research is focussed on the UK. See   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/electricite_de_France How might a P2P system democratise the energy market? The GAF implies democratisation in part from the use of distributed ledger technology (said to provide all market participants with read and write access to the records for the production, sale, and purchase of energy).  Comment: would...