A new consortium has received a successful bid in the Innovate UK Net Zero Living programme with it now eyeing up to £5 million in the next stage to boost its energy planning technology.
The consortium, which is made up of Advanced Infrastructure, Oxfordshire County Council, Dundee City Council, Perth and Kinross Council as well as Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), aims to create a low cost digital solution to whole systems energy planning.
This will help overcome non-technical barriers and is applicable to multiple local government structures.
The proposed technology will allow users to assess the potential for renewable technologies, model the impact of new energy projects within the digital twin and build costed decarbonisation pathways comprising dozens of modelled projects.
In doing so this will accelerate the development and delivery of local area energy plans and statutory Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategy (LHEES) in Scotland.
Alongside this, the consortium hopes the technology will boost local energy projects by developing datasets and software solutions to overcome systemic barriers such as finance, capability, coordination of grid reinforcement, and system governance.
Through a successful initial bid, the consortium will gain a share of £2 million to develop the technology. Phase two aims to fund up to six places with £5 million each to demonstrate some of the outputs from phase one.
“We are thrilled to have been awarded the phase one funding through the programme. Having worked closely with many local authorities in developing a robust digital solution to local area energy planning, we understand that currently there is a lack of finance, capability, and data to plan and deliver a whole system energy transition,” said Christopher Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Advanced Infrastructure.
“Our objective is to now develop a digital solution to whole-systems energy planning that helps places overcome the non-technical barriers of finance, capability, coordination of grid reinforcement and system governance.”
