Macro DE - Technology Development Opportunities

Abstract:

This project quantified the opportunity for Macro level Distributed Energy (DE) across the UK and accelerate the development of appropriate technology by 2020 for the purposes of significant implementation by 2030. The project studied energy demand such as residential accommodation, local services, hospitals, business parks and equipment, and is developing a software methodology to analyse local combinations of sites and technologies. This enabled the design of optimised distributed energy delivery solutions for these areas.

This deliverable is number 3 of 3 in Work Package 3. Its objective is to model supply equipment improvements either already under development or which could theoretically impact the commercial viability of Macro DE. These models will be the input information for the Work Package 4 tool.

The aim of the Macro DE project is to assess the opportunity for optimising low carbon distributed energy solutions for the UK. This will be achieved by evaluating the aggregated UK energy demand, modelling the supply equipment and developing a software tool, which can use the provided supply and demand data to design characteristic energy centres.

The purpose of Work Package 3 (WP3) is to characterise the supply equipment to be used by the software tool being developed in WP4. The equipment to be modelled was agreed in Task 3.1. The commercially available supply equipment was modelled in Task 3.2. Task 3.3 was to model supply equipment improvements either already under development or which could theoretically impact the commercial viability of Macro DE. Any change in technical standards, which could help improve efficiency, was also covered as part of Task 3.3. In addition, it was decided to create models in Task 3.2 but at a larger scale due to a change made in the agreed upper boundary (from 10MWe to 50MWe) of the equipment power rating as well as some additional technologies (with currently low penetration in the UK market) as requested by the ETI.

The range of equipment modelled had previously been specified as between 100 kWe and 50 MWe. It was hoped to include 3 sizes within these limits for each type of supply equipment. However, it was not possible for all technologies investigated due to their current available scale, for example largescale CHP using CCGT tended to be larger than 50 MWe, so only two models could be included in the list.

AECOM were invited to conduct a portion of the work in Task 3.3 due to difficulty in obtaining data outside of Caterpillar’s field of influence and requiring information from Caterpillar’s competitors. Information to create the modelswas collected from manufacturers where possible but due to the commercially sensitive nature of the cost and availability or reliability data this could not always be achieved. In addition, some information was extracted from available literature for some systems, such as large scale solar heating, which have yet to be built in the UK.

The projected technical improvements (2020 – 2030) were obtained from consultation with manufacturers and experts in the industry. For the mature technologies like gas-engines, the projected technical advancement is the future technical standard set by the main players in the field. For less developed technologies like fuel cells, the projected technical advancement is the technical judgment from the manufacturer who has been contacted.

Despite the difficulties stated above, it was felt that the approach taken in Task 3.3 hasprovided the Macro Distributed Energy project with a view of the various types of technology at present and a reasonable estimate of the potential for technical improvements.

Publication Year:

2011

Publisher:

ETI

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5286/UKERC.EDC.000273

Author(s):

Lok, K., Adler, D., Cripps, A and Woods, P.