Accelerator Consortium for Renewable Energy ACRE

Accelerator Consortium for Renewable Energy

( ACRE )

The SouthWest Region - A Transformative Demonstrator for the UK ?

Welcome !

To our (temporary) ACRE web pages.

Executive summary

ACRE is a consortium of the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth the University of the West of England, Plymouth Marine Laboratory and key industrial and NGO partners, to develop a research program which will transform research, innovation and knowledge transfer in the renewable energy sector in the South West. The many individual and unique features of our region will enable the ACRE consortium to potentially lead many of the UK’s research efforts in meeting its 2020 renewable energy obligations. These web pages are hosted on behalf of the consortium by Great Western Research ( GWR ) as part of its continuing program of activities “ Driving Innovation Through Research Collaboration “.

Rationale

The Department of Energy and Climate Change, DECC, and the UK Dept for Business, Innovation and skills (BIS) acknowledge that only a varied and increasingly low-carbon mix can meet the joint challenges of energy security, climate change and affordability. Renewables are a vital part of the UK’s diverse energy mix, with the original target set in 2000 (10% by 2010) being doubled in 2006 to 20% total energy contribution from renewable sources by 2020. This is an increasingly challenging goal, since on current performance the UK is unlikely to meet the required EU objective of a 15% contribution from renewable energy (RE) resources by 2020. Analysis conducted within the South West indicates that generating 15% or up to 20% of all energy consumed in the South West from renewables is possible by 2020, but that this would require rapid changes in technological development / implementation, and national policy, and stronger support from decision makers at a local level.

Without such changes less than 5% of the region’s energy will come from renewable sources.

The challenging nature of the 2020 target and the significant deployment risks mean that it will be essential to achieve high and rapid deployment in a range of renewable technologies. With an appropriate support and development framework, the South-West Region, with its natural resources, intellectual capital and business community is in a good position to achieve this and to realize:

Changes in the regional policy and regulatory framework that will reduce financial, technical, political and social barriers/risks to the deployment of RE technologies.

An acceleration of the penetration and deployment of RE technologies.

The opportunities of RE technologies in making a difference with regards climate change mitigation, energy system resilience and ‘green’ economic growth.

Why the South-West Region?

The South West has an appropriate mix of environmental assets to be mobilized:

Unique mix of significant wind, wave and tidal energy resource and proximity of these to major population centers.

The highest solar insolation in mainland UK

A high proportion of agricultural land and forestry resources suitable for the production of sustainable bioenergy and biofuels

The South West has an important concentration of knowledge and expertise across the private, public and HE/FE sectors:

High density ‘hotbed’ of renewable energy companies (750 on the RegenSW database) from micro SMEs, to large consultancy companies and the presence of major multinationals as well as significant industrial partnerships such as BETS (Bristol Environmental Technologies and Services).

Unique collection of HEI energy sector expertise in a portfolio of renewable technologies, systems science, technology appraisal and energy policy, with a well-developed culture of sectoral engagement,

A track record of successful research collaborations between HEIs and businesses in the renewables area developed under the Great Western Research (GWR) initiative.

Significant NGO and Government Agency presence in the Region, e.g. Center for Sustainable Energy, The Environment Agency HQ, Plymouth Marine Lab, the Met Office, Devonport Dockyard.

The South West has regional political commitment to the deployment of renewable energy production:

Committed public sector investment in innovative renewable energy technologies, such as the Wave Hub (£40M) off the Cornish coast and feasibility studies into harvesting tidal power in the Severn estuary (£20bn).

A well developed mood amongst the public and business for engagement in sustainability throughout the region and cultural openness to engage with transition to Low Carbon economy across all sectors.

What are the Challenges ?

The challenges of facilitating an integrated approach to the deployment of renewable energy production come from a range of sources touching on the technologies themselves and the width of the technological base embraced by the sector as well as from tackling social, political and economic constraints and realizing opportunities.

In detail these challenges include:

A change management challenge: how to facilitate a partnership that will deliver regional integration mechanisms transferable to the other regions and nations in the UK in time for their impact to be felt by 2020.

A technical challenge of ensuring that deployed RE technologies are mature enough, reliable enough and cost effective enough to deliver to the National Grid or other distributed systems. This would include overcoming the ‘end of grid’ barrier to flexible integration of these technologies with a National Grid and the development of solutions for distributed energy system management.

The technical challenge of building RE generation technologies that are robust enough to face up to testing environmental conditions eg going to deeper water (offshore wind), design for maintenance and reliability (wave).

The integration challenge of ensuring that engineering R&D takes into early consideration the demands of environmental and socio-economic stakeholders reducing lead times and avoid conflict once technologies have been ‘designed

The policy challenge of ensuring that policy-makers (such as spatial planners or utility regulators) are aware of the implications of RE technologies in order to ensure financial, political and social engagement.

The delivery challenge: even if we can develop the RE technologies, the technologies and the energy they produce still need to be brought to market and they need to deliver through market mechanism. There is thus a challenge of developing detailed risk analysis to develop workable business cases for investors and supply chain.

The lifestyle change challenge: transforming the supply side of the regional energy system is only half the story. All gains generated through the deployment of RE technologies to generate energy will be lost if we do not fundamentally change the supply side environment. In other words there is a challenge to investigate the barriers and drivers of lifestyle change and choices at the individual and community scale

The Aims of the Consortium :

This consortium bid aims to position the South West region as leader of the UK's delivery of the 2020 renewable energy pledge, and an exemplar to other regions. This will involve transformative delivery of innovative practice, effective knowledge transfer and implementation and development of a strong skills base. We seek to fund work to provide the catalyst which consolidates other major funding streams through the partner HEIs and the co-ordinating efforts from GWR, inward investment through the involvement of RegenSW and other collaborative activities across the broad partnership.

The Key ACRE Consortium Partners

Regional support and NGOs

Great Western Research (GWR)

The Great Western Research (GWR) program currently supports 130 PhD projects and 20 full time Research Fellows, working in 10 Universities across the South West. Sustainability and Renewable Energy represent a key theme for GWR which currently co-funds 36 PhD research projects in Sustainability and Renewable Energy , in partnership with South West businesses.GWR has developed a unique dual supervisor, industry co-funded model for collaborative PhD programs which will be used to support studentships in the ACRE consortium. GWR also fully funds 20 Research fellows, 4 in sustainability research , and these fellows have attracted over £5m of new research funding into the South west over the last 4 years.Overall GWR had been instrumental in securing ca £15m of new research spend in the South West since 2006.

For more details go to the main Great Western Research pages

RegenSW

RegenSW - the sustainable energy agency for South West England, is a not-for-profit company based in Exeter, which aims to speed the transition to a low-carbon economy in SouthWest England,by unlocking sustainable-energy business opportunities, accelerating the uptake of the region's renewable energy resources and championing effective energy-demand-reduction initiatives in the region. For more details go to the RegenSW web site :

The ACRE Universities and Institutes :

Bath University - I-SEE. Holds significant expertise in energy technology assessment, solar photovoltaics, energy storage (advanced batteries and fuel cells), hydrogen energy systems, bioenergy and biofuels. The University holdsthe second largest portfolio of SUPERGEN EPSRC projects nationally.

Bristol University - BRITE. Has expertise on low cost solar photovoltaics, marine tidal turbines, electrical energy power management, composite turbine technologies, micro-generation and heat pumps. They also run a successful CTD in Complexity Science and an EngD programme on Systems Engineering in co-operation with Bath university.

Exeter University – Overarching strategic university level support for interdisciplinary Climate Change and Sustainable Futures translational research. Partner in PRIMaRE: Expertise in prediction and optimization of wave energy conversion, wave resource analysis, power distribution networks, moorings technology, risk analysis, policy and regulation, sustainability, environmental monitoring and assessment, turbine technologies, manufacturing, supply chain, materials, systems modeling.

Plymouth University – Has significant expertise in coastal science, coastal engineering, wave energy conversion, tidal stream turbines, numerical modeling, computational fluid dynamics, environmental monitoring and impact assessment of physical processes and marine biodiversity, navigation, socio-economics, policy and maritime law. Partners in the Plymouth Marine Sciences Partnership through the Marine Institute.

University of the West of England - the Institute for Sustainability, Health and Environment (ISHE). The Low Carbon Group brings together expertise in systems modeling and analysis, microbial fuel cells, biofuels and wind energyconversion. The Sustainable Buildings Center provides expertise in retrofitting renewable energy systems and in thedesign of low energy buildings. The Center for Environment and Planning and the Cities Research Centre together provide expertise in the evaluation of projects, sustainability appraisal of energy developments, understanding of theplanning systems, policy analysis, community engagement, analysis of social deprivation and environmental justice implications of energy developments.

PRIMaRE - The Peninsula Research Institute in Marine Renewable Energy : - Exeter and Plymouth are partners in the South West RDA supported research collaboration, PRIMaRE. This has brought new research capacity andequipment to the Universities to support development and deployment activity at the Wave Hub. Twelve newacademics have joined existing research teams and are collaborating on prioritized research in consultation with Device developers, SWRDA project teams, the Met Office and the UK Hydrographic Office.

Plymouth Marine Laboratory - evaluating the impacts of offshore renewables on marine biodiversity, assessment of the impacts of turbines and other structures on coastal processes, including site-based hydrodynamic and sedimenttransport modeling studies, integration of socio-economic aspects into development appraisal.

The consortium Members above have a strong track record of exiting research collaborations under the GWR initiative, and currently jointly hold a total of 36 GWR PhD studentships

and 4 GWR research fellowships in Sustainability research.

The overall aims and objectives of the ACRE consortium are

outlined in a PowerPoint presentation, which you can view

as a pdf document.

Thank you for your interest in the ACRE Project