Energy Systems Catapult UK

The challenge

The United Kingdom faces the dual challenge of reducing carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 while accommodating a projected 40% increase in electricity demand. Meeting these targets necessitates substantial investments in renewable generation, network infrastructure, and innovative technologies like energy storage, carbon capture, and hydrogen. However, systemic barriers hinder progress, requiring the energy sector to open new markets and overcome obstacles to deliver the necessary innovations.

Rebecca Sweeney, Business Leader – Homes, Energy Systems Catapult

The response

In response, Energy Systems Catapult established the Living Lab program, a national facility where industry, government, and academia collaborate to test and demonstrate new energy technologies, services, policies, and regulatory innovations.

This program facilitates real-world trials with real people in real homes, enabling the confident deployment of innovations at the scale and pace required to achieve Net Zero ambitions.

Energy data is captured from homes via mainstream smart meters, smart heating controls, battery storage, solar PV, electric vehicles and chargers, heat meters and more. All these technologies are linked via the Living Lab’s Digital Integration Platform. The Living Lab can also flex the operation of electric vehicle charging and heating systems, to test how these might be used in future energy systems. This enables the testing of emerging solutions alongside mainstream and in-market technologies like smart meters and IoT devices.

Data capture is combined with qualitative and quantitative consumer insights research, to understand both what consumers are doing, why, and how they experience new innovations.

The results

Over 3,500 households have now volunteered to participate in the Living Lab program, contributing to the development of clean technology innovations aimed at helping 28 million homes in the UK reach Net Zero emissions.

The Living Lab includes a diverse mix of homes, spread across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, representing a wide variety of tenures, property types, and demographics, including vulnerable and fuel poor households.

Since 2019, the Living Lab has helped innovators ensure their products and services are market ready. Evidence from Lab trials has helped innovators improve their products and services for consumer experience, product-market fit and commercial viability, and helped them unlock more funding to take their business to the next level.

Recently, the Living Lab partnered with PNDC, a whole energy systems research, test and demonstration environment at the University of Strathclyde, to create the Whole Energy Systems Accelerator (WESA) facility. WESA is a world-first energy innovation test environment that transports real households into future energy system scenarios. It combines the Catapult’s Living Lab and PNDC’s capabilities in network emulation into a new facility enabling real-time simulations of future energy system scenarios, with real homes. This combination enables innovators to model the network impact of new innovations and understand how innovations might perform under future market conditions.

This is helping energy networks understand changing energy demand and how to optimise the grid in future energy system scenarios. Innovators can quantify the value of flexibility their innovation could provide to energy networks, and policy makers and regulators test new ideas in a safe sandbox environment.

Demand for trials and data services continues to increase.