On Wednesday 16th October I will be presenting at the Innovate UK, Knowledge Transfer Network event, the vision of a 2050 zero carbon community enabled not just by modernising energy data access, but also by bringing together cross-sector data from both industry and government.
As part of the Industrial and Clean Growth Strategies, the UK Government is investing in projects that can enable innovation and decarbonisation across sectors. In partnership with Ofgem, BEIS and the Office of National Statistics, I am proud to have been part of the team specifying this Innovate UK SBRI Competition to bring the best and brightest to design, build and demonstrate how data can be used to deliver on the 2050 Climate Change Act targets for the UK to reach net-zero carbon emissions.
Our approach to specifying this competition has been to envisage a community that has already reached this target and then to work through how this would have been achieved and what data would therefore need to be shared across sectors to make this happen.
The decarbonisation of the Energy Sector cannot reach this target in isolation. Transport, industry and our homes must also decarbonise and whilst the energy sector is pivotal to this effort, the picture painted by just this one village shows that every sector has a part of play. This must all be underpinned by the secure sharing of data, as envisaged by the Centre for Digital Built Britain, Digital Framework Task Group's document "The Gemini Principles".
In this typical village in Somewhere-shire, the energy grid is now decentralised, meaning that your house and indeed, your car - now an electric vehicle with smart charging capability - are now part of the energy system. Aside from solar panels on individual houses, there are also communal renewable generation assets. To reinforce the grid there are communal EV charging stations in your local car park, with energy storage and supply units to smooth out the charging peaks. How and where to place these assets is understood from continually modelled demand, capacity and constraints of your local energy network. Overlaid are local planning permission rules for a conservation and nature reserve areas such as wetlands. Biodiversity studies ensure that the placement of communal renewable generators doesn't destroy the nature we are endeavouring to save. Construction rules and local guidelines are merged and overlaid so that the new build apartment block contributes to this community to pick up slack from the historic buildings that have restrictions, so we need not bulldoze our heritage to create this zero-carbon village. Consumer-archetypes built on official statistical models ensure that the vulnerable within our community are protected, working and travel patterns ensure the community's business zone continues to support the local and national economy, enables the commuter community to get to their work, all the while balancing the carbon emissions from any industrial output. The community can also trade its excess energy across open exchanges and weather analysis is used to forecast the trade-off between energy import and export that will be necessary to balance the local council budget.
Even with this rough sketch we can see that everywhere we look, there is a need to securely share data, to match, link and overlay that data and thus enable the services need by just this one community for it to reach and maintain the zero-carbon goal.
The picture of a National Digital Twin may seem like a distant, even unachievable goal, whose value is debated against projects with known short-term benefits. However the problem domain described above is real now. For example, within Camden Borough, London they do not know where they could place 100 electric vehicle charging points because it's currently not possible for private companies to see the demand, capacity and constraints of the local, low-voltage network to see where those charging points could be positioned and what reinforcement, in form of localised generation and storage, would be required to support them.
The target for all new cars to be electric is only 15 years away and the zero-carbon goal only 30 years. The National Digital Twin is a grand project with a 20-30 year timescale. The problem at a micro-scale is here today and the actions just to begin to address it will take years of investment. This Innovate UK competition, alongside the Energy Data Taskforce work being kicked off in 2020 and the Centre for Digital Built Britain "Commons" proposals currently being worked on are the early steps in this journey.
I was at an Ofgem sponsored Sustainability & The Climate Emergency event last week and a repeated theme from the speakers was that each of us has to look at ourselves and ask "what are we doing?" to meet this emergency. #Data, #Architecture and #CyberSecurity are what we do and where we can help.
What are you doing?
Update: The Webcast KTN - Innovate UK competition briefing is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgtBN724etg
The competition briefing and application materials and guidance are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/modernising-access-to-smart-energy-data-apply-for-contracts
The Ofgem additional materials for the competition are here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2019/09/innovate_uk_modernising_energy_data_access_competition_-_supplementary_information_0.pdf
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