Planning Regional Infrastructure in a Digital Environment (PRIDE Alpha)
| Funding mechanism | Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) |
|---|---|
| Duration | Oct 2023 - Apr 2024 |
| Project expenditure | £559K |
| Research area | Accelerating decarbonisation of major energy demands. |
Project Summary
Planning Regional Infrastructure in a Digital Environment (PRIDE) Alpha phase, aims to develop both technical and organisational solutions to integrated planning and connection of decarbonised heat and transport demand, that reduces overall cost and timescales. The project focusses on using data and digital demand planning, across multiple levels of the energy system, to facilitate, manage and integrate multiple demands across heat, transport and energy demand reduction. PRIDE will produce a whole systems digital planning tool and regional governance structure to support local authorities to produce more Local Area Energy Plans at lower cost, and that serve energy network planning needs.
The Challenge
The deployment rate of renewable heat and EV infrastructure is 1/10th of the rate required in the 6th Carbon Budget. Energy networks are acting as a barrier to the decarbonisation of major demand due to their inability to respond to changing local customer demand; whilst local authorities (LAs) aren't developing viable projects at a rate that meets their decarbonisation targets.
Whole systems planning to enable decarbonisation is challenging and not currently mandated. Whilst Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) can provide a 'single source of truth' that unlocks greater collaboration, LAs are not required or funded to produce LAEPs and the market currently cannot offer users a cost-effective solution that services both LA and infrastructure planning needs.
Technical barriers between network operators and local authorities such as non-interoperable data models also prevent parties working collaboratively. LAEP and energy network scenario modelling (DFES and FES) have different data models and outputs that prevent interrogation, and current digital tools don't have collaborative functionality nor the ability to share and enable access to third parties.
These barriers are causing uncertainty and impacting decisions about infrastructure needs, which is hampering investment and the pace of progress to deploy low carbon technologies at scale, but we know that improved governance and coordination of local energy systems in line with strategic investment in gas and power network operators could reduce capital costs by 7% (SSEN 2020).
Project Aims
Planning Regional Infrastructure in a Digital Environment (PRIDE) Alpha phase, aims to tackle this problem by investigating how a digital twin, incorporating regional infrastructure and a detailed view of buildings and demographics of their occupants, can improve decision making and reduce risk, when planning the investment to decarbonise major energy demands.
The Alpha phase will focus on both the development of the digital twin and how it can be enabled and utilised within governance structures that emphasise local decision making; and what supporting models and datasets are required. The digital twin will incorporate new functionality to enable prioritisation and zoning in away that serves as a functional LAEP for both the local authority and network operators.
The Alpha phase provides a powerful opportunity to develop and embed best practice local and regional approaches and will support and inform the roll-out of a future Regional System Planner (RSP) within the wider governance landscape and facilitate the identification of local demand flexibility, providing value for the ESO, DNOs and local authorities.
Potential Users
The users and business sponsor is NGED's Forecasting and Capacity team that has responsibility for converting demand forecasts from DFES into investment decisions in capacity and network upgrades. The team is incorporating the new function of local authority engagement and will incorporate learnings into service delivery. Local authority users will be officers responsible for energy, transport, heating, housing and waste who will use the tool to plan projects and prioritise areas for investment.
Work Done to Date and Discovery Learnings
The Discovery phase identified 17 potential use cases for the digital tool that will benefit local authorities, energy networks, private sector and the wider economy. The Alpha phase will build on these use cases to demonstrate the prototype tools and new datasets in a test region.
The project will integrate learning from NIA projects Equinox, Defender, Venice and EPIC that provide relevant information on flexibility, energy efficiency impacts, vulnerable customers and future load profiles. Governance structures developed by WMCA as part of its Deeper Devolution Deal from central Government and under PfER RESO will be applied and tested. Gaps in capability will be mapped and organisational and technical methods will be used to close them.
Alignment with Challenge Theme
The project develops both technical and organisational solutions to integrated planning and connection of decarbonised heat and transport demand that reduces overall cost and timescales. The project focusses on using data and digital demand planning across multiple levels of the energy system to facilitate, manage and integrate multiple demands across heat, transport and energy demand reduction.
Innovation and TRLS
The project develops a digital tool from TRL5 to TRL6 to include new datasets and analytical models to support a wider set of use cases that will be selected to support the decarbonisation of major energy loads. These additional functions will also provide valuable tools to enable emerging organisational structures to implement regionally driven whole systems decision making.
Alpha phase will trial a tool to simplify complex decision-making for energy network and local government users. Desktop-based single-user workflows are now becoming obsolete as organisations move their software systems entirely to cloud-based platforms for which advanced scenario modelling is available to anyone with a web-browser. The use of common design tools for building portfolio owners, housing developers and transport planners will enable collaboration and transparent data driven decision-making. The solution will develop CIBSE and BSI compliant retrofit modes that leverage enhanced national-scale datasets such as HMRC VOA, HMLR, EPC/DEC using common PAS2035/SAP standards to ensure open and interoperable outputs in line with Principle 8 of the Net Zero Living Data Guidance.
Improving on the State-of-the-art
Previous modelling was limited by GDPR and organisational barriers preventing stakeholders sharing data. Scenario modelling represented a substantial capacity and capability barrier, as well as a huge cost. This innovation improves on the state-of-the-art by replacing spatially aggregated data and PDF reports with always-up-to-date data assets. The building-level data sets, modelling tools and digital interfaces will enable data-driven investment decisions. This reduces the time and skills required to deliver net zero projects and allows for use-case centred data asset creation.
Work Done to Date
The tool targets emission reduction in domestic building stock by accelerating the rollout of retrofits. This project will extend the scope of the tool to include more accurate data and modelling tools for domestic low carbon technologies. The project will integrate learning from NIA projects Equinox, Defender, Venice and EPIC. These provide relevant information on flexibility, energy efficiency impacts, vulnerable customers and future load profiles. Governance structures developed by WMCA as part of their Deeper Devolution Deal from central Government and under PfER RESO will be applied and tested. Gaps in capability will be mapped and organisational and technical methods will be used to close them.
Suitability for SIF Funding
The SIF mechanism allows for longer-term and strategic engagement of local government and commercial partners by network operators. This partnership allows the co-creation of technical and organisational solutions to the complex challenge of multifactor decision analysis across diverse organisational boundaries. The large-scale trial of a beta phase enables the testing of these solutions at meaningful scales before their adoption by other network operators. The sponsorship and reporting to OFGEM is highly relevant to their ongoing consultation on the Future of Local Energy Institutions and Governance and as an architect of the Regional System Planner and Future System Operator functions. The organisational challenges and complex data and digital solutions are not suitable for exploration under business-as-usual. The consortium meets the partner requirements by inclusion of public sector bodies (the WMCA has a statutory function in transport planning and housing development and also leads consortia on retrofit with partner social housing providers), and Transmission and Distribution Network Operators, enabling the examination of the Regional System Planner function from multiple perspectives
Alpha Outcomes
We will:
- Establish how digital tools can support collaboration between Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) and local authorities for the purpose of developing Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs).
- Prototype and test features of the tools and prioritise a software development roadmap for Beta phase development.
- Map these features onto Regional System Planner (RSP) functions and identify how the tool supports the new organisational model.
- Specify what changes to data models are needed in Beta phase to ensure interoperability of forecasting models across each organisation interacting with the RSP.
- Understand the practical steps to integrate the RSP with local government institutions.
- Examine the effectiveness of facilitated engagement between local authorities and sub national infrastructure bodies for the purpose of LAEP.
Alpha Outputs
- A small-scale Alpha trial with up to 50 users for the technical solution across five local authorities within the WMCA. User research and testing will validate the functional and non-functional specifications of the technical solution. New software prototypes will be developed for three use cases:
- Use Case 1: support the siting of heat networks and heat pump clusters. New data layers of heat network and heat pump network deployment potential will be developed from detailed building stock models.
- Use Case 2: optimise the siting of EV infrastructure against available network capacity: Integrations with existing EV charging demand models, charge point registers and NGED network capacity will be developed.
- Use Case 3: collaborative environment for network operators and local authorities: Digital workflows will guide users through a series of scenarios enabling local authorities to create data-driven deployment plans. These scenarios can be explored and interrogated in a dialogue between local authorities and network operators. Discrepancies between local authority generated LAEPS and energy network generated DFES and FES projects will be reconciled and will evidence impact on constraint zone and EHV/HV/LV.
- Designed regional-scale Beta phase Governance trial (6.6). Alpha will prototype the full-scale Governance trial by developing Terms of Reference (6.2) and formalise the structures to continue to work with engaged stakeholders, based on learnings from Discovery. We will establish two stakeholder panels: The Net Zero Infrastructure Delivery Panel (NZIDP) and the Local Area Energy Planning Co-ordination Group (LAEP-CG) (6.3). Both will link to local customer segment groups across housing, transport, industry and public estates (6.1).
- We will work with Ofgem's local governance team who will observe the trial to understand regulatory barriers to whole system collaboration and agree their role in Beta. Feedback from the trial will be documented (6.5) to inform RSP development and regulatory amendments.
- A report comparing data models and modelling assumptions between LAEP, DFES and FES and recommendations for alignment in Beta phase.
- A detailed plan for a Beta phase that will demonstrate the use of the tool and governance model at a larger scale and supporting cost benefit analysis
Responsibilities
Advance Infrastructure will lead outputs 1-4 exclusively and output 6 with support from NGED & ESO. WMCA will lead Output 5 with the support of Regen. NGED will lead Output 7 with the support of all partners.