Category Archives: Domestic

The Future of Energy – Dr David Greenwood

Dr David Greenwood discusses talks delivered at a recent Cafe Scientifique event by three CESI researchers on their vision for the future of energy .

About the author:

Dr David Greenwood is a researcher with the National Centre for Energy Systems Integration (CESI) and is based at Newcastle University.

His research focuses on taking advantage of flexibility within energy systems and understanding sources of uncertainty and variability such as customer demand and intermittent generation.

Contact details: david.greenwood@ncl.ac.uk        Profile details

Inspired by the Great Exhibition of the North, Newcastle University hosted a series of Café Scientifique events at the Urban Sciences Building, part of the rapidly expanding Newcastle Helix site.

The National Centre for Energy Systems Integration organised one of these events, with the title “The Future of Energy”, where three CESI researchers presented the vision of the UK’s energy future, and how we can get there.

Cafe Scientifique:  The Future of Energy  at Newcastle University’s Urban Sciences Building

Dr David Jenkins – who had travelled from Heriot-Watt University for the event – gave his thoughts from the perspective of energy demand, how it could change it, and how we could meet it. Dr Jenkins talked about the data challenges in modelling energy demand. This includes the temporal and spatial scale of the available data, and the effects of aggregating large numbers of energy users, which generally works in a modeller’s favour by giving a smoother, more predictable pattern of demand. The impact of a number of low-carbon technologies, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps, which are vital if heat and transport are to be decarbonised by moving them onto the electricity system, was examined, with the summation of these changes resulting in the potential for a substantially different demand pattern to that experienced today.

Figure 1: The potential difference between present and possible future energy demand

Next, Dr David Greenwood spoke about the need for flexibility within the energy system, and the challenges in procuring it through the markets and mechanisms that are currently used by the energy industry and in particular the electricity system operators. Dr Greenwood’s main argument was that we need flexibility – which already exists on the system in many forms – to address uncertainty on a variety of timescales ranging from when a customer plugs in their electric car, to how quickly and substantially low carbon technologies are adopted, to when new power stations are completed, all with the possibility of a failure anywhere in the system at any time. He concluded by presenting a flexibility case study based around energy storage, and showing how uncertainty and flexibility can be included within operational decision making processes.

The final presentation of the evening was given by Dr Andrew Jenkins, and had a focus on the whole energy system. Dr Jenkins talked about how the whole energy system can deliver cross-sector flexibility while still fulfilling the needs of its customers. He demonstrated this with a case study on electric vehicles using Vehicle to Grid charging technology, which could meet a set of system requirements whilst ensuring that their drivers would have enough energy to complete their journeys at the end of the day. He concluded with a detailed description of the university’s new InTEGReL site – a joint venture with Northern Powergrid and Northern Gas Networks which will showcase the potential for heat, transport, gas, and electricity to operate synergistically, providing cross-vector energy flexibility, and allowing validation of models and theory arising from academic research.

Figure 2: An overview of the InTEGReL site

The evening ended with a discussion with the audience – a range of attendees; consumers, prosumers, consultants, academics – which broadened the debate to include the political landscape, and more input from the perspective of the energy consumer. The audience had a breadth of technical knowledge, and their questions reflected this. Electric vehicles – which link the electricity and transport sectors – were the most popular topic for discussion, but the potential of power to gas, sources of inertia in zero-carbon energy systems, and the impact of energy efficient homes were also discussed. The event ended by a resounding agreement from the audience that they would like to attend another event on the topic of energy.

If you would like to suggest a topic for a future event, please get in touch at cesi@ncl.ac.uk.

How concerned should I be about my smart meter security? – Dr Zoya Pourmirza

cyber, Domestic, energy bills, Energy Systems, smartgrid

With Smart Grids comes data and communication infrastructure and the associated unease of how we keep this data and infrastructure safe.  This article aims to raise awareness, by sharing knowledge about cyber-security considerations behind the UK smart metering infrastructure and it’s rollout.

About the Author

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Dr Zoya Pourmirza, is a postdoctoral research associate at Newcastle University within the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. She was awarded her PhD in The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Architecture in the Smart Grid from University of Manchester. Her research expertise includes Smart Grids ICT networks, cyber-security, communication energy efficiency, and data compression.

Zoya carries out a wide range of research for CESI in the area of cyber-security on energy systems.

Contact:- Zoya.Pourmirza@newcastle.ac.uk

Smart Grids comprise a number of different networks that offer communication infrastructure at the various levels within the power grid. For example:

  • Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)
  • Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
  • Customer Energy Management Systems

Amongst these communication networks, the AMI system has received significant concerns. These disquiets are mostly around security and privacy of consumers. Most of these concerns could be the result of negative media coverage or lack of knowledge of the AMI system operating as a whole system, while its components are interacting together.

A peace of mind for the Smart Grid customers

It is worth noting that the smart metering infrastructure is not a single component or function, but it is a whole system. This implies that looking into the cyber-security issues of a single component such as a smart meter, individually, would probably give invalid results.

Accordingly, the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) and GCHQ designed the AMI system in such a way that no single compromise would offer a significant impact. The DECC/GCHQ security team developed practical cyber-security control by using the “trust modelling” and “threat modelling” approaches. The former model refers to understanding how different players in the AMI system interact, and where trust needs to be managed. The latter model considers a set of hypothetical intentional/unintentional attack model that could cause an impact. Therefore, cyber-security should not be viewed as a hindrance to the GB smart meter roll out.

Components of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)

Organisations involved in the design of the whole smart metering system are:

  • Gas and electricity meters, and related equipment
  • Distributed Network Operators (DNOs)
  • Data Communication Company (DCC)
  • Communication Service Provider (CSP)
  • Third parties (e.g. price comparison websites)
How to curtail the impact of vulnerabilities in a Meter

Although it is not possible to build a 100% secure system, but the best practice is to minimise the impact of the vulnerabilities by providing a balance between security, affordability, and business needs, while meeting the policy and national security objectives.

The following chart visualises security concerns, potential attacks, and countermeasures in the AMI system through a number of phases where an attacker tries to gain access to the smart meter to create a negative impact on the power grid.

 

This article, however, does not suggest that it is impossible to compromise the AMI system, but it discusses it would be a relatively arduous process to cause severe impact on the power grid, and customers are not as vulnerable as what they think they are. Therefore, while researchers should take the security and data privacy into consideration, we can focus our energy and resources on cyber-securing other segments of the Smart Grid, which can cause greater negative impacts on the power grid infrastructure and customers.

 Reference:

Gov.uk. (2014). Smart Metering Implementation Programme: Great Britain Companion Specification version 0.8 – GOV.UK. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/smart-metering-implementation-programme-great-britain-companion-specification-version-08.

The role of the building engineer within the development of energy systems – Dr David Jenkins

built environment, carbon emissions, Domestic, Energy Systems

National Centre for Energy Systems Integration (CESI) Co-Investigator, Dr. David Jenkins, is a research specialist in sustainable buildings.  In this week’s blog, he discusses how buildings can be considered in future energy systems and how his CESI research is shaping this consideration.

About the Author

Dr David Jenkins is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Sustainable Building Design at Heriot-Watt University. He has over 70 publications in the area of low- energy buildings, energy policy, and climate change adaptation. He has worked on a number of EPSRC projects concerned with the energy use of the built environment, such as Tarbase,  Low Carbon Futures, ARIES and CESI and has contributed to a number of reports in these areas for UK and Scottish Governments. He is currently PI of the CEDRI project, looking to apply community energy analyses to case studies in India.

Contact details:- d.p.jenkins@hw.ac.uk  Profile Details

The built environment has always been of great importance in any discussion of carbon saving targets in the UK. 13% of UK carbon emissions emanate from heating/cooking in residential buildings alone[1]. 29% of emissions are linked to “energy supply” (including electricity supply to the built environment), with other sectors (e.g. “business” at 17% and “industrial processes” at 3%) also having energy consumption that is heavily linked to the built environment. Therefore, as we map out our future energy systems (gas/electricity grids and other energy pathways) we must have an understanding of the evolving energy demand characteristics of the diverse range of buildings that we occupy.

A practitioner with a particularly good understanding of this detail, the building engineer, often has their professional boundaries drawn around the building itself. Therefore, the sizing of a boiler, assessment of general building performance, and choices related to low-carbon design are not always placed in the context of other important factors within the energy supply chain.

Whilst this focus is to some extent defendable – the challenges of low-carbon building design are, in themselves, considerable – it does run the risk that crucial knowledge of building performance is not reflected in energy system modelling. This is particularly true when we investigate the steep vectors of change facing our energy systems in the coming decades. Coincident changes in climate, technologies, fuels, and operation, provide a landscape of uncertainty that must be consistently reflected in projections of every aspect of our energy system: supply, infrastructure/distribution, storage, and demand. For example, a future projection assuming the continued existence of an established mains gas grid for heating homes is not necessarily consistent with the installation of several million heat pumps for residential heating. The latter change should, therefore, be accompanied by an assumption on the supply-side that the gas grid will either be reduced in scale or used for something else. Policy in these different areas must also be similarly synergistic.

The building modeller is crucial to our understanding of energy demand but, with energy systems (e.g. National Grid) involving multiple actors from different disciplines, a key challenge is to provide guidance and future projections that are translated into different discipline-specific vernaculars. Integration across the disciplines must be reflected in modelling approaches, policy-making frameworks, and outputs. The CESI project, where novel modelling techniques are being used to explore the effect of future buildings on national energy systems, sees this as a key challenge in producing actionable guidance to a range of practitioners.

Another issue that often dissuades the traditional building modeller/engineer from interacting with wider energy system analysis is “scale”. Modelling a building is quite different to modelling buildings. Capturing the energy demand characteristics of a community of buildings (e.g. such as might be served by a substation) requires an understanding of the diversity of energy use. A “spikey” electrical demand profile of a single dwelling (showing kettle’s boiling and toasters toasting) is quite different to that of a 200-dwelling profile, where different behaviours and activities are summated together in a smoother profile. Likewise, asking a building engineer to consider the aggregated demand profile of, say, 200 gas boilers working at slightly different schedules is a step change from a detailed hourly profile of a single boiler. Yet this level of detail is particularly valuable when we consider what might happen to energy demand at specific times in the future. Will electric heat pumps create national electrical demand profiles that are more difficult to meet for energy suppliers? Or are such changes perfectly manageable providing storage and management solutions are utilised at the correct point in the network? And what happens if millions of people wish to home-charge their electric vehicles at similar times in the evening? What does a new residential electrical demand profile now look like for the UK? This, therefore, does not just require an understanding of scale, but also that of temporal resolution; daily averages of energy use will not indicate where and when such problems might be manifest, and what their solutions might be.

The future building engineer will be required to build on existing core skills to reflect the above context. Changes to energy supply (such as carbon intensity) will, ultimately, alter our assumptions of “good” and “bad” technologies for the built environment. Conversely, technological and behavioural change in the built environment will change our assumptions on how to supply that energy efficiently. This co-evolution of change across sectors is central to CESI and encapsulates the challenge to, but also the value of, multi-disciplinary energy system modeling.

[1] 2015 UK GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS, FINAL FIGURES, 7th Feb 2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/604350/2015_Final_Emissions_statistics.pdf

Saving on Domestic Energy Bills – How to compare domestic energy bill tariffs

Domestic, energy bills

 

As part of a series of posts focussing on consumer energy consumption reduction in the UK, this post highlights some advice in understanding a domestic consumer energy bill based on advice from Ofgem,  the government regulator for gas and electricity markets in Great Britain

ofgem_icons

Saving on Domestic Energy Bills by finding a cheaper supplier 

In the UK, the energy regulator Ofgem, has encouraged domestic energy consumers to reduce their annual energy bills by switching to alternative tariffs with their supplier or switching supplier altogether. Tariffs are the prices that Energy Companies change per unit of energy used.

To help the consumer navigate the complex world of energy tariffs, Ofgem regulated that Energy Supply Companies must provide a “Tariff Comparison Rate” for all the energy tariffs that they bring to market.

Tariff Comparison Rate1

The Tariff Comparison Rate  (TCR) is there to act as a price comparison guide for all energy customers. It breaks down the cost of an energy tariff by combining everything from the unit rates, standing charges, VAT and discounts into one amount and then dividing it by the average annual consumption figures published by Ofgem – the energy regulator.

The idea is to allow all tariffs to be compared against one another, by giving you a single price per kilowatt hour for the energy you use.

This is how it is calculated:- 

  • multiple the unit cost by ofgem’s average energy consumption figures 
  • Add a year’s standing charge (this is a daily charge and can vary significantly between tariffs)
  • Take away any discounts that might be applicable
  • Add the VAT
  • Finally, divide this figure by Ofgem’s average consumption figures
  • This gives you the TCR in pence per kWh (kilowatt hour)

Common Energy Tariffs2

There are two main types of energy tariff – fixed or variable rate. Dual fuel and online options are an opportunity for further cost saving.

  • Fixed– this is a tariff with a fixed end date
  • Variable– the prices of this tariff aren’t fixed, so your supplier can change them as long as they give you advance notice.
  • Duel Fuel– based on a supply of energy for both your gas and electricity from one supplier – sometimes more economical
  • Online– specifically operated online, meaning paperless bills etc. so may be slightly cheaper than other tariffs

Does this save energy?

Switching supplier or finding a cheaper tariff will not reduce energy consumption – it will only reduce the amount the consumer pays for their energy. Look out for our next blog which provides some easy ideas on how to save energy within the home.

1https://www.ovoenergy.com/blog/ovo-news/tariff-comparison-rates.html

2http://www.goenergyshopping.co.uk/energy-tariffs-and-deals/common-tariffs