Public Funding for Krakenflex Limited

Offshore wind will be pivotal in helping the UK meet its net-zero 2050 target but successfully increasing the proportion of offshore wind in the energy mix will require the industry to aggressively pursue measures to facilitate the smooth integration of energy generated into the grid. There are a range of technical challenges that must be overcome to achieve this, one of which is the ability of offshore wind farms to actively and competitively provide frequency and inertial support services. This presents an opportunity that Upside Energy Limited plan to take advantage of using our existing cloud based platform, the Upside Platform, that provides services to forecast, monitor, optimise, trade and analyse distributed energy resources, on a software-as-a-service basis. This project will investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of using the rotational inertia of a wind turbine in combination with the Upside Platform to allow wind farms competitive access to frequency and ancillary support markets. The feasibility will be established using the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult's 7MW Levenmouth demonstration turbine as a reference turbine. This will involve the development of a new turbine operational mode and integration of the turbine into the Upside Platform via a data transfer interface. Phase 2 will involve a full scale demonstration of the technology using the Upside Platform and the LDT in order to demonstrate the technical merit of the solution and assess the economic and environmental benefits of deploying it.

GRIDSERVE are bringing to the UK market a revolutionary product: the Solar Electric Forecourt(r) that will make electric vehicle charging as easy as using a petrol station and be supplied by clean, low-cost solar energy. Our national network will address public concerns around mass-market EV charging that is currently preventing widespread adoption while simultaneously balancing the electricity grid and expanding solar energy generation. Each site will contain up to 24 ultra-rapid charging bays with charging speeds of less than 30 minutes, a multi-megawatt battery storage system, solar canopy and on-site facilities including convenience retail, healthy eating and airport-style lounges with high-speed internet. The UK's first Solar Electric Forecourt(r) demonstrator is a key step in GRIDSERVE's vision to deliver convenient, mass-market, rapid charging at prices that are competitive to home charging. The UK-wide network roll-out will include over 100 future-proof local community charging hubs across urban areas and transit corridors requiring an ambitious £1B capital investment programme that is strongly aligned to the UK Government's Road to Zero strategy. GRIDSERVE has worked with world-class partners to design the sites including Arup, a leading multi-disciplinary design firm and Chargepoint, which operates the world's largest and most open EV charging network primarily in North America. Each site will have dedicated zones for both consumer and fleet vehicles, such as taxis, buses and delivery vehicles and will be designed with the EV user at the centre with the objective of making owning and operating an electric vehicle an enjoyable, convenient and stress-free experience. This demonstrator project is an exciting opportunity for all consortium partners. Essex County Council (ECC) aims to be at the forefront of the clean growth agenda and electromobility innovation while facilitating low-carbon transport and consumer choice for EV users. The ECC will examine how this innovative product can support reduction in carbon emissions and pollutant levels in urban and urban-fringe areas while assessing the contribution to local communities. Upside Energy will enhance its cloud-based platform to optimise and despatch on-site infrastructure by using advanced algorithms to provide real-time forecasts for EV charging demand and solar generation. Brunel University will use this data and on-site research to study the practicalities of successfully operating a Solar Electric Forecourt(r) based on customer numbers, arrival and charging times, power requirements and usage of on-site facilities. Together, these collaborative workstreams will provide invaluable insights during the demonstrator project and be exploited across the national network roll-out.

"One of a number of strategic investment projects within the £875 million City Leap Programme, the BESST (Bristol Energy Smart System Transformation) project will design a customer focused way to deploy smart energy (heat and power) and digital technology at scale, to reduce energy system costs and deliver a radically new customer experience for local energy consumers and businesses. Building on the Bristol's track record as green energy pioneer as well as the UK's most creative city, the BESST project aims to create a cluster of smart homes and businesses across four wards in west Bristol including the Avonmouth and Severnside Enterprise area. Putting the consumer at the heart of the project, the BESST project will adopt Bristol's unique approach to engage with local residents, businesses and communities, to develop new customer/community solutions to deliver energy saving and reduced requirements on the network. Digitally integrated within developing flexibility and Smart City Platforms, these energy consumers will then be empowered to take advantage of a number of new and innovative energy service propositions including, for example, new smart and local generation tariffs, ""Energy as a Service"" models, energy management and optimisation, sustainable community transport and, in the future, energy peer-to-peer trading and local energy markets. Linking energy demand to local generation, and incorporating new demand for electricity for heat and transport, within an overall energy flexibility platform, Bristol consumers will also be able to trade their demand flexibility to provide energy system services and to help balance the local energy network. Thereby demonstrating how integrated local energy systems can further reduce energy system costs and provide network services at both a local and national level. The scale and ambition of the project is intended to demonstrate how public private investment in replicable local solutions, using smart and digital technology, could transform the UK's energy system delivering customer centric solutions at lower cost. In the process showcasing Bristol and the UK's technology innovation and smart energy system capability to international markets."

"GRIDSERVE are bringing to the UK market a revolutionary product and concept: the Electric Forecourt(tm) that addresses the current public concerns about mass-market charging of electric vehicles whilst simultaneously generating renewable energy and solving grid challenges. The concept is highly aligned to the UK Government's 2018 Road to Zero strategy. Our products are designed for the modern age and will make owning and operating an electric vehicle in the United Kingdom an enjoyable, convenient and stress-free experience. Our vision for the project is to assess the commercial feasibility, select a suitable site and design a technical solution for the UK's first Solar Electric Forecourt - a utility-scale, grid-connected, renewable energy powered piece of next generation transport infrastructure. This innovative solution will offer convenient, mass-market, charging infrastructure that incorporates ultra-rapid DC vehicle charging, battery storage and solar generation on a single site location. The project will test feasibility of managed charging use cases and business models for Solar Electric Forecourts in a variety of urban and urban-fringe environments. Our partner, Upside Energy will focus on models to optimise additional revenue by using flexibility of Forecourt batteries and charging facilities both to provide balancing services to the grid and to optimise revenue earned from solar PV generation linked to the Forecourt (either physically or virtually)."

"The Greater Manchester Local Energy market (LEM) project will test the feasibility of a GM region wide local energy market which responds to \`place-based' constraints and market needs. The key driver for the project is to enable and increase the flexibility in the energy distribution network through: novel management tools (including building management systems), Market Aggregators and virtual power plants (VPP) to allow higher penetration and accelerated deployment of renewable energy sources (RES) and demand side(DSR) response opportunities. The project is led by Electricity North West Ltd (ENWL) and brings together the resources of Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), Hitachi EU, Bruntwood and innovative SME Upside Energy. The projects key objectives are; \*identify the requirements for a LEM, ie control and trading platforms. \*establish if this needs to integrate with other local control platforms, particularly those operated by project lead ENWL, to provide balancing services locally and an interface to the national transmission system. \*Demonstrate the value the LEM can bring to stakeholders in the region including domestic and commercial consumers, smaller renewable projects, vehicle to grid projects and ENWL through providing a platform for energy optimisation across a complex and highly populated region."

40% of UK population live in urban environments without access to off-street parking, so cannot install home Electric Vehicle (EV) chargers. If these people cannot access on-street charging infrastructure, we will not hit national targets for EV uptake and electrification of transport. Charging infrastructure suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem: people won't buy EVs if they cannot see that infrastructure is available, and local authorities won't install infrastructure if they cannot see demand for EVs. V2Street explores routes to break this deadlock by developing a novel consumer value proposition that uses flexibility in V2G-enabled charging to provide demand side response (DSR) services to the energy system. We estimate V2G can provide significantly more revenue from these services than unidirectional charging. Our objectives are to use this value stream to create an integrated consumer proposition. Residual revenue from DSR services then supports investment in charging infrastructure. To develop this integrated proposition, we will define a range of consumer propositions and business models based on modelling of revenue that DSR flexibility can create. We will test these propositions with consumers, analyse their impacts on energy system and urban infrastructure, and develop prototypes of an integrated chargepoint-EV-cloud system to deliver the services. We will then undertake a second, focused phase of consumer research using these prototypes. This will provide robust data on technical performance and consumer acceptance, positioning us to develop future, larger-scale trials. V2Street's vision is to break the chicken-and-egg deadlock, triggering a "virtuous circle" of infrastructure investment and EV uptake. V2Street will give confidence to energy system stakeholders (suppliers, distribution network operators (DNOs), National Grid) to develop service requirements that exploit the flexibility of V2G. This in turn will give confidence to participants in chargepoint supply chains to invest in charging infrastructure. The V2Street consortium covers two complete supply chains, from vehicle manufacturer to chargepoint operator, local authority and consumer, and from consumer to energy flexibility aggregator, DNO and supplier. It combines highly innovative SMEs at key points in the supply chains with large companies with the depth of resources needed to support exploitation at scale. Major academic institutions ensure we gather robust consumer research and solid evidence to frame transport and energy policy to address this key challenge to EV uptake.

"EV batteries can provide significant flexibility to the grid and hence value to the consumer, but this must be considered in the context of consumers' wider lifestyle and systems. HAVEN will examine the value that V2G and V2H (vehicle-to-home) enabled EVs can provide to consumers within the context of other energy storage systems (e.g. LI-Ion batteries attached to solar PV arrays; thermal storage via hot water tanks) in the home. HAVEN will address questions such as: * The value that V2G-enabled EVs can create by providing flexibility services to the system operator, distribution networks and energy suppliers. * How this value varies when EV batteries are combined with other home energy storage systems. * How value varies across different energy consumption and generation patterns, different driving and commute patterns, etc. * How value varies with different use cases for sharing energy between home energy systems. It will do this by creating robust models of a variety of home energy storage configurations, and using these to determine the value each configuration can create when providing services to the energy system. HAVEN will then test the models against the unique facility of the Salford Energy House (a Victorian terraced house in a climate-controlled chamber), ensuring that they robustly capture the dynamics of different use cases across a range of weather and other factors. This will ensure that the models and resulting consumer propositions accurately reflect the value that can be captured by consumers and the energy system in real world conditions. This will create a unique set of models demonstrating the value V2G-enabled EVs can create for consumers within the wider context of their homes and lifestyles. It will provide unique insight into potential customer propositions and business models for V2G, and also into the algorithms that must be developed to capture and exploit this value within Upside Energy's cloud service that orchestrates distributed energy storage resources and delivers their flexibility to the grid."

V2GO (Vehicle-To-Grid Oxford) will develop, trial and evaluate potential business models, on- and off-vehicle hardware and products and services by engaging with UK fleet operators. Fleet vehicles account for 56% of new registrations and are quickly (i.e., ?3 years) turned over into the private market. A better understanding of fleet operators' attitudes and valuations of different V2G technologies, products and services could create additional pathways for increasing the uptake of Ultra Low Emission Vehicles (ULEVs). The energy storage capacity of electric vehicles (EVs), present new opportunities and value propositions for V2G power system services (e.g., potentially alleviate the need for generation and transmission investments; increasing network efficiency and energy security. Given the size and use patterns of fleets, they could generate economies of scale that will help realise V2G opportunities and maximise their values. V2GO brings together an interdisciplinary consortium of 8 partners from industry and research with expertise in energy and power markets and systems, fleet operation value chains and electric mobility. The project will address three objectives: 1\. To build confidence in and demonstrate the value of V2G to fleet operators; 2\. To engage with and understand ULEV owner's attitudes to V2G services and technologies; 3\. To demonstrate the technical and commercial potential for ULEVs through the power grid and vehicle-to-building to directly and indirectly support the electricity system. These objectives will be met through a real-world demonstrator trial (WP3), a portfolio of research (WP4; WP5), development of V2G business models, products and services (WP2, WP4) and exploitation and dissemination (WP6, WP7). The trial will run for 20 months and involve at least 100 EVs from different sized fleets including Royal Mail, UPS, DPD, DL, EDF Energy, Oxford County Council, University of Oxford and Addisson Lee. Two novel tools will be developed to facilitate the provision of V2G products and services and maximise their value: 1) a flexibility assessment toolkit, allowing fleet managers and V2G aggregators to work together to quantify the potential benefits of fleet electrification, and the added value of providing V2G products and services; and 2) a real-time coordination platform which will assess: a) based on the size and operation of an EV fleet the combination of V2G services that could maximize overall value (e.g., short term operating reserve, firm frequency response, enhanced reactive power services); and b) how fleet operation could potentially be modified to improve value, considering power system and mobility value chains.

To design and implement a novel unified security framework that expands the currently deployed OpenADR protocol and complies with the ISO27001 standards.

To develop a machine learning architecture and embedded capability to enable Upside Energy to continuously evolve its ensemble of algorithms for grid prediction and demand response portfolio management.

The DESIRE project will explore supply chains that integrate grid demand response services with domestic hot water and battery storage. If successful, the project will open up new supply chains and income streams for markets that can underpin the intergation of large-scale intermittent energy into the grid. Upside Energy has developed a novel, cloud-based, demand response platform which will choreograph a fleet of Mixergy tanks and Powervault home battery systems over the course of the trial. Mixergy have developed a range of innovative electric hot water tanks that have intelligent controls and sensing, so enabling them to communicate with Upside's platform. Powervault's award winning home battery system will enable Upside to provide a bidirectional energy storage service. The objectives of the trial will be: to understand how systemic value from distributed energy storage can incentivise stakeholders to install intelligent tanks & batteries; to quantify the true multi-vector energy storage potential that exists within households; to assess consumer responses; to develop optimal control strategies for integrated battery / hot water tank systems & identify optimum supply

The 12 month First Of A Kind "GBDESC: Grid Balancing via the Domestic Energy Supply Chain" project is focused on installing Home Energy Storage Systems (HESS; including Batteries, Inverters, Meters, and Control Systems) into 400 homes with PV systems, and then in using these systems to provide balancing services to the grid. In doing so the project will firmly establish the technical, regulatory and financial benefits of mass deployment of low carbon energy storage systems, and their aggregated integration into National Grid’s balancing services. The eight partners in the project are Upside Energy, Sharp Labs Europe, Sharp Electronics, Southend-on-sea Borough Council, Sustainable Homes, Stoneford Associates, Imperial College and National Grid. Trends such as growth of renewable generation, plus electrification of heating and transport, are creating dramatic changes on the grid. This creates an £8bn p.a. UK opportunity for storage and Demand Side Response (DSR). The GBDESC project will create the first demonstrator of dynamic balancing of energy supply & demand via the domestic & community energy supply chain at commercial scale. The project will develop a repeatable model to deploy home energy storage systems & use them to provide balancing services to the grid. This opens up a route to deploy tens of GWh of energy storage into domestic properties, thus providing substantial flexibility and hence value to the grid. The GBDESC project will deploy an integrated solution that creates value across the supply chain, thus enabling deployment at scale. It is based on two technology innovations: Upside Energy’s highly scalable & flexible cloud platform for managing energy storage on large numbers of domestic sites & hence aggregating it into a coherent Virtual Energy Store (VES); and Sharp’s Home Energy Management System (HEMS), which manages power flows within a house and makes energy within the HESS available to the VES. The project builds a sustainable supply chain around these two innovations by creating value for HESS manufacturers, installers, landlords, tenants, homeowners and the grid. It also addresses two key supporting factors: financing packages to support repeatable deployment at scale, and policy recommendations to support this deployment.

The Balanced Energy Networks project will deliver both a physical and digital network to integrate systems that will enable the balancing of heating, cooling, electricity, and carbon, in a way that minimises costs. Addressing the energy trilemma - delivering security of supply, at low cost, and with low carbon emissions - is a key requirement for achieving a sustainable and prosperous economy. The Balanced Energy Networks project will build a working demonstration of the integrated system at London South Bank University (LSBU). This will involve the construction of an inter-seasonal thermal storage system to balance the production of heating and cooling throughout the year. It will also create a bi-directional network to balance electricity supply and demand. Attached to these physical and information and control networks will be a range of innovative technologies including one which can both generate electricity and remove carbon dioxide from the air, allowing the overall system to be carbon neutral.

"Upside Energy is building a cloud platform to aggregate energy stored in devices such as uninterruptible power supplies, batteries attached to solar PV arrays, electric vehicles, & domestic hot water tanks. It will use this energy to provide balancing services to National Grid, thus making it easier to integrate renewable generation onto the grid. This work will help us define strategies for distributing our control algorithms across our portfolio of devices."

Domestic hot water tanks are a pivotal element for an effective demand side management strategy. The UK has an estimated 13.9 million hot-water tanks, of which 59% use electricity as a primary or secondary energy source (this will rise as the UK moves towards DECC’s vision of a 2050 low carbon economy). Currently, this represents an installed energy store of at least 43GWh, four times that of Dinorwig, UK's largest pumped hydro facility . By comparison in 2013, the peak generation deficit in the UK’s electricity network over one half hour settlement period was 1.48GWh. This project brings together three SME's to address the creation of a supply (and value) chain to access this under-utilised storage capacity to deliver an effective DSM asset that responds to the dynamic needs of the grid. It will integrate novel hot water tank controls and decision making algorithms, with novel digital platforms and energy aggregators to allow end-user/supplier communications and effective supply chain business models.

Upside aims to build an ICT service that aggregates energy storage capacity in thousands of small devices and coordinates the charge/discharge cycles of these devices to create a coherent energy store that can be used to manage demand on the grid. By working with a wide range of devices (e.g. Uninterruptible Power Supplies, Electric Vehicles, battery storage systems for domestic solar arrays, heat pumps), we can build a significant energy store with very flexible operating characteristics. Our initial target is to build a 30MWh store from "spare" capacity in small (<50kW) UPS currently installed in the UK. Such a store can be made financially viable by offering it to National Grid's Fast Reserve scheme. By shifting demand from peak periods to times of higher renewable generation, such a store can also significantly reduce CO2 emissions associated with electricity generation. An initial prototype for Upside is being developed for the finals of the Nesta Dynamic Demand Challenge. This project will help us build a pilot-scale service with a novel, "pluggable" ICT architecture, develop new algorithms for coordinating additional classes of device, and explore emerging business models.