Search

In The Birth of Energy (2019), Cara New Daggett offers an incisive critique of the dominant thermodynamic concept of energy. 'Energy', Daggett shows, is inextricably tied to an exploitative productivist politics that extols the virtues of work and the sins of waste. In this paper, I seek to develop new conversations between Daggett's account in The Birth of Energy and an important empirical development within the energy industry that Daggett herself does not consider: the smart grid. The paper draws upon a mixed-methods research project, investigating a UK smart grid trial called 'OpenDSR' devised and implemented by Manchester-based co-operative Carbon Co-op, with funding from the UK government. I draw on my research within OpenDSR to make two interconnected arguments. Firstly, I argue that the smart grid sees an intensification of the energy-as-work logic that Daggett opposes, taking pre-existing preoccupations with calculation and measurement within the energy system to new extremes in pursuit of the maximisation of efficiency and the minimisation of waste. I then proceed to think through the political implications of this argument, contending that while the smart grid reproduces the dominant energy logic that Daggett critiques, it might still have a part to play within an emancipatory environmental politics. In making this claim, a second argument emerges, constituting a sympathetic critique of Daggett's account more broadly. Daggett offers an incisive and important contribution that does much to develop debates within the energy social sciences and humanities. However, I suggest that her account risks obscuring some important political differences between variegated forms of work and waste: while she makes a persuasive case for an anti-work conceptualisation of energy that portends liberation from waged labour, her analysis of the kinds of 'efficiency' that pertain to the energy system seems less compelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart meters (SM) with wireless capabilities are one of the most meaningful applications of the Internet of Things. Standards like Zigbee have found a niche in transmitting data on energy usage to the user and the supplier wirelessly via these meters and communication hubs. There are still certain difficulties, notably in delivering wireless connectivity to meters situated in difficult-to-reach locations such as basements or deep indoors. To solve this issue, this paper investigates the usage of mesh networks at 868 MHz, particularly to increase coverage, and proposes an additional mounted antenna to significantly increase outside coverage while providing the necessary coverage extension for hard-to-reach indoor locations. Extensive measurements were made in Newbury in both suburban and open environments for validation and delivery of a simple statistical model for the 868 MHz band in United Kingdom conurbations. Results presented in this paper estimate that mesh networks at 868 MHz can accommodate large areas constituting several SMs with the proposed coverage extension method. With our findings and proposed methods on mesh connectivity, only 1% of UK premises will require mesh radios to achieve the desired coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating renewable energy technologies into a decentralised smart grid presents the 'Duck Curve' challenge — the disparity between peak demand and solar photovoltaic (PV) yield. Smart grid operators still lack an effective solution to this problem, resulting in the need to maintain standby fossil fuel-fired plants. The COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns necessitated a shift to remote work (work-from-home) and home-based education. The primary objective of this study was to explore mitigating strategies for the duck curve challenge by investigating this notable shift in behaviour by examining the effect of remote work and education on grid and decentralised solar PV electricity use in 100 households with battery energy storage in the southwest of the UK. This study examined 1-min granular grid electricity and decentralised solar energy consumption data for April–August 2019 and 2020. The findings revealed statistically significant disparities in energy demand. Notably, there was a 1.4—10% decrease in average electricity consumption from April to August 2020 (during and following the lockdown) compared to the corresponding months of 2019. Furthermore, household grid electricity consumption was reduced by 24—25%, while self-consumption from solar PV systems increased by 7—8% during the lockdown in April and May 2020 compared to 2019. This increase in self-consumption was particularly prominent in the morning and afternoon, possibly attributed to the growing prevalence of work-from-home and home-based education. The dynamic shifts in energy consumption patterns emphasised the role of decentralised solar PV energy in meeting the evolving needs of households during unprecedented societal changes. Additionally, remote work might unlock decentralised solar PV's potential in resolving the 'Duck Curve', urging further investigation into the implications for energy infrastructure and policy development. • Analysed 1-minutely grid and decentralised solar PV energy demand data from 100 houses in a southwestern UK city. • Average electricity consumption decreased by 1.4—10% in April—August 2020 compared to 2019. • Grid electricity consumption was reduced by 24—25%, and from solar PV self-consumption increased by 7—8%. • Increased solar PV self-consumption was prominent in the morning and afternoon. • Might unlock solar PV's potential of resolving the 'Duck Curve.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urgency of climate change means that low-carbon transitions are needed in large socio-technical systems such as energy and transportation. These transitions must be rapid, but also fair. An emerging body of evidence suggests that users have important roles in transitions, yet much previous research has examined user involvement while assuming it to be largely a positive force. This goes against a growing amount of evidence within sociotechnical studies that highlight the potentially obstructive or negative role that users may play in transitions and innovation. In this study, we pose a critical question: In what ways may users perpetuate injustices within a transition? To answer this question, we provide conceptual background on energy justice and user adoption of low-carbon energy and mobility technologies. We then analyse users and energy injustices in three low-carbon transitions – solar energy in Germany, electric vehicles in Norway, and smart meters in Great Britain – based on empirical data from interviews, focus groups, and internet forums. Our main contribution is to show how users in low-carbon transitions are not always positively engaged, or even neutral, but can introduce and contribute to inequality and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international rollout of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in the residential water supply sector affords tremendous benefits in driving water-use efficiencies, accurate billing and network management (e.g. leak detection). AMI, using 'smart meters' fitted at a dwelling level, record water consumption at high temporal resolution. Since water is typically only consumed when householders are present, these data could offer a non-intrusive means of inferring dwelling occupancy patterns. These insights could have a range of benefits dependent upon the spatiotemporal scale and the intended application – our interest is in the potential of these data to identify dwelling type, specifically to identify dwellings that have occupancy patterns associated with tourism, such as second homes or short-term holiday rentals. We focus on these data in a UK context and draw on data rarely available for academic research. Our data relate to a sample of dwellings in Devon and Cornwall, South West England. They capture high-temporal resolution water consumption during Covid-19 'lockdown' and 'staycation' periods, providing a unique opportunity to demonstrate that these data can reveal the unusually pronounced property-level occupancy trends evident during this period. We apply Non-Intrusive Occupancy Monitoring (NIOM) to extract dwelling-level occupancy status (occupied/unoccupied) on a day-by-day basis. We group properties according to their occupancy trends, inferring a set of properties that exhibit occupancy characteristics associated with tourism. We demonstrate that these show correspondence with underlying indicators of tourism activity, drawn from AirDNA records of short-term tourist rental properties in this area. Ongoing global rollout of AMI means that these data will be routinely available at the dwelling level and we reflect on the benefits they could provide in generating near real time insights into dwelling occupancy. Drawing on our collaboration with the Office for National Statistics (the UKs national statistical institute) we outline the considerable potential that these data and approaches could offer in the collation of small area housing and tourism statistics. • Data collected by smart water meters offer potential re-use value in determining dwelling type and occupancy. • Domestic smart water meter data can be used to infer property occupancy status during periods of Covid-19 'lockdown' and 'staycation'. • Properties are grouped according to occupancy status, revealing dwellings that have occupancy patterns consistent with short term tourist rentals. • Those properties inferred to represent tourist rentals exhibit occupancy rates that are consistent with tourist dwellings drawn from AirDNA records. • This approachcould have considerable value to the UK Office for National Statistics in the provision of housing and tourism statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The shift to increasingly smarter grids will require preparation and planning on the part of a diverse selection of current and future stakeholders. There are substantive sources of uncertainty that will impact on the adoption of smarter grid solutions. Risks and uncertainties are placed in one of seven categories: markets, users, data and information, supply mix, policy, investment conditions, and networks. Each of these has the potential to add risk to the planning profiles of the stakeholders involved. Here, UK stakeholders drawn from industry, government, regulators, and academia are canvassed about potential sources of uncertainty within the UK’s electricity sector and the attendant risks that might be engendered by them. Highlights • Stakeholders identified risk sources which might hinder growth of UK smart grids. • Risks linked to uncertainty in smart grid development are discussed. • Seven groups of risks and uncertainties are identified. • Stakeholders identified four cross-cutting issues as barriers to UK smart grids. • The smart grid is not a single endpoint, networks will become incrementally smarter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Smart Meter Implementation Programme (SMIP) is arguably one of the most expansive and complex smart meter programmes globally. The UK government regards smart meters to be enablers of a low-carbon energy grid and has set out ambitious consumer-orientated aims within their programme across England, Scotland, and Wales. Despite considerable amount of research on how consumers will (or not) engage with smart meters, media discourses, where some public debates about smart meters are created and reproduced, have received little attention. This paper presents a content analysis of how smart meters are discussed within 11 years of popular print media coverage. A collection of nine discourses are identified: Four of these – “empowered consumers”, “energy conscious world”, “low-carbon grid”, and “future smart innovation” – depict smart meters as a harbinger of positive social change. Five of these – “hacked and vulnerable grid”, “big brother”, “costly disaster”, “astronomical bills”, and “families in turmoil” – represent smart meters as negative forces on society. The results show that discourses and associated storylines mainly represent continuous struggles over particular socio-technical promises linked to smart meters. Somewhat missing are attempts to open up the smart energy debate to broader issues of democracy and energy justice within the print media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK has adopted legal obligations concerning climate change which will place increased stresses on the current ‘traditional’ model of centralised generation. This will include the stimulation of large volumes of intermittent generation, more distributed generation and larger and more variable loads at grid extremities, potentially including large volumes of electric vehicles and heat pumps. Smarter grids have been mooted as a major potential contributor to the decarbonisation of electricity, through facilitation of reduced losses, greater system efficiency, enhanced flexibility to allow the system to deal with intermittent sources and a number of other benefits. This article considers the different policy elements of what will be required for energy delivery in the UK to become smarter, the challenges this presents, the extent to which these are currently under consideration and some of the changes that might be needed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the integration between what used to be a passive element of the energy value chain – the grid – and both upstream and downstream elements. The evolution of communications among the elements has permitted a more robust and adaptable structure that already is being implemented: the Smart Grid. The paper relates the evolution of EU policy concerning both the development and the rolling-out of solutions to exploit the potential of the Smart Grid concept and describes what has been done by the regulators of three countries that share the same goal but seek to attain it via distinct paths. The article starts with a justification of the need for more integrated networks and a definition of the Smart Grid. A second part covers the risks and difficulties of implementation within an established network, introducing the role of the regulator. The third part describes EU policy response and three different approaches by regulators in the UK, Italy and Portugal, showing how in each case policy is influenced by characteristics of their respective national electricity markets in terms of competition dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the knowledge-willingness, willingness-performance, and knowledge-performance gaps regarding reducing carbon dioxide emissions and emerging technologies of the 2137 British residents. Household's heating sources and heat settings are anticipated as key criteria for evaluating respondents' performances. The study revealed more than 80% of respondents have a good knowledge regarding climate change and carbon issues. The study found a smaller gap in knowledge versus willingness as 59%, 87%, 88% and 85% of respondents want to use bioenergy, afforestation/reforestation, solar and wind for their future energy sources. The Multinomial logit regression (MNLR) investigates that incrementing good and very good knowledge index increases the odds of a high willingness to save energy by 33% and 6%, respectively. The willingness versus performance study identified 96% as claiming to be more likely energy savers, whereas, in reality, 52% of them never or rarely took basic measures like setting their heating system to turn off. Despite having a good and very good knowledge index, the knowledge versus performance appears, 75% of respondents are using gas boilers and gas central heating. Policymakers and the research community need to develop comprehensive plans by taking these wider social issues to meet net-zero targets. Employing smart building principles, lowering the installation costs of the new smart technologies, awarding and encouraging the energy saver, setting individual carbon footprint limits, and training and empowering household representatives to select better energy for houses could popularise the emission reduction technologies in the UK. • More than 80% of respondents have good knowledge concerning climate change issues. • Respondents' knowledge vs willingness to reduce carbon emission has less gap. • Willingness/knowledge vs performance to reduce carbon emission has an enormous gap. • 85–90% of respondents wish to use carbon reduction technology for future energy. • 75% of respondents, despite having good knowledge, using gas heating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We model carbon emissions in electric systems. [•] We estimate emissions in generated and consumed energy with UK carbon factors. [•] We model demand profiles with novel function based on hyperbolic tangents. [•] We study datasets of UK Elexon database, Brunel PV system and Irish SmartGrid. [•] We apply Ensemble Kalman Filter to forecast energy data in these case studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] An optimised design model was developed for new build energy distribution schemes. [•] The carbon constrained design was examined for a real case study at Ebbw Vale, UK. [•] The carbon constraint significantly increases the cost of build to the developer. [•] The optimal design and cost were shown to be sensitive to the year of construction. [•] The method used to evaluate grid electricity emissions impacts the optimal design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposed future UK energy supply infrastructures harbour ambitions for achieving a sustainable and reliable energy network, which can potentially be realised through a decentralised and flexible approach to electricity generation. Such an energy system will be expected to deliver these objectives through the widespread use of distributed energy resources, thereby contributing to the international aim of a low carbon future. Existing research in the area of distributed energy resource integration has developed the energy hub methodology [Geidl M, Koeppel G, Favre-Perrod P, et al. The energy hub – a powerful concept for future energy systems. In: Proceedings of the third annual Carnegie Mellon conference on the electricity industry, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 13–14 March 2007, pp.1–10.] to formally model flows within an energy network, abstracting generation from multiple energy carriers (e.g. electricity, wind and natural gas) and allowing a modular energy network construction that facilitates optimal placement of distributed energy resources within each hub. This article will present the energy hub approach to modelling a decentralised energy network, illustrated with two case studies from the East and West coasts of Scotland. The resulting analysis will show the impact of two scenarios with different energy mixes available whilst reflecting the subtle differences in demands across areas with different weather profiles. This is a fundamental progression of existing distributed energy resource research to date in that individual characteristics and costs of a mixture of technologies are modelled. Such analysis will be pivotal in planning future networks to ensure that they function optimally and also in directing policy to encourage consumers to adopt a different approach to energy generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EcoIsland is a wide-ranging initiative under which the Isle of Wight – a mainly tourist-oriented island off the English south coast – plans to become a net energy exporter by 2020, while halving its residents’ energy bills, eliminating waste going to landfill, and creating a significant number of green-tech jobs. EcoIsland – the largest single sustainability project in the UK – will also see hydrogen vehicles on the roads and in the water around the Island, as well as providing a demonstration of smart grid technologies in tandem with the use of hydrogen for both vehicle refuelling and energy storage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The residential sector accounts for 30 % of the total green house gas emissions in Europe, which can be reduced either by switching to low-carbon technologies or reducing the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed. In this work, a new greenhouse gas emission (GHGE) reduction system at the house (nanogrid) level is investigated. The originality of the proposed system and underlying algorithm lies in the fact that it acts in a proactive manner, by continuously controlling and optimizing energy flows between on-site local power production systems (photovoltaics - PV - array in our case), loads, and storage units (combining battery and thermal storage reservoirs). This system/algorithm is evaluated based on real-life input datasets from the United Kingdom (UK) and France, and compared with traditional house energy infrastructures, namely (i) a house not fitted with battery, and (ii) a house fitted with battery but without additional "smart" software layer. Results show that it performs better in terms of CO 2 (capacity of the algorithm to reduce the amount of non carbon-free energy consumed from the grid), Power to Grid (capacity to maximize the use of local green energy), and financial cost (capacity to reduce the overall electricity bill), respectively improving performance by up to 8 % , 10 % and 37 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing levels of complexity, due to growing volumes of renewable generation with an associated influx of power electronics, are placing increased demands on the reliable operation of modern power systems. Consequently, phasor measurement units (PMUs) are being rapidly deployed in order to further enhance situational awareness for power system operators. This paper presents a novel data-driven event detection approach based on random matrix theory (RMT) and Kalman filtering. A dynamic Kalman filtering technique is proposed to condition PMU data. Both simulated and real PMU data from the transmission system of Great Britain (GB) are utilized in order to validate the proposed event detection approach and the results show that the proposed approach is much more robust with regard to event detection when applied in practical situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost a decade ago, a UK-based water company contacted PAPA Ltd. to install one of its zero energy pumps as the usual electric pump, new grid connection and pump house, which was the only option for this project, would have cost millions and remained costly to maintain. The result from PAPA was the Venturo, with its low lifecycle cost, thanks to almost zero maintenance and no energy costs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the UK, Shell Research Ltd and National Grid Plc have joined the Hydrogen Gas Inject feasibility study, which is part-funded by the government''s Technology Strategy Board under its Smart Power Distribution and Demand competition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]