OXFORD SUPER CHARGES ITS RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

In 2019, Oxford City Council declared a climate emergency. It wasn’t alone in doing this – many other councils across the UK have done the same thing, from Bristol to Bromsgrove, Cheltenham to the Forest of Dean, Reading, Redditch, Rugby to West Berkshire and many more.

There’s no financial gain in a council declaring a climate emergency either –but it does galvanise activity.

However, the city’s carbon reducing ambitions are much older. Way back in 2010, Oxford City Council launched the Low Carbon Oxford project, where a network of organisations committed to reduce carbon emissions in Oxford by 40 per cent by 2020. Now the council wants to go carbon neutral by 2030.

One of the city’s flagship low carbon projects is a £41 million Energy Superhub Oxford. This is an innovative infrastructure project looking to decarbonise energy, transport and heat.

With the massive shift towards energy generation from wind and solar, the UK needs to find ways of harnessing that power and being able to control it when it’s despatched.

The superhub will house some pretty mighty batteries – which will act like warehouses for the power grid, enabling the storage of power when the sun is shining for use when the demand is much higher.

The superhub is creating what it says is the world’s most powerful electric vehicle network to accelerate the electrification of transport, and the consortium is installing more than 300 ground source heat pumps around the city to replace oil and gas fired boilers with clean electrical equivalents.

The project is a demonstration of lots of different technologies but what ties it all together is the technology and understanding to be able to control the assets to deliver what the customer wants, deliver a profitable system and enable the power grid to be cleaner.

By 2022, the consortium wants to have got the entire Oxford community on board, which will drive adoption rates of electric vehicles and heat pumps higher than anywhere else in the country, and challenge other cities to do the same.

Energy Superhub Oxford is a consortium of six partners, led by Pivot Power, and includes public, business and academic organisations. The funding for the project was achieved thanks to a multi-millionpound award from the UK’s innovation agency UK Research and Innovation. One of the brains behind the project is Oxford-based Habitat Energy. The company calls itself an asset optimiser and is the first in the UK to blend data science and an algorithmic approach with an understanding of batteries and the traded markets and ancillary services in which they operate.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Andrew Luers explains: “We use these capabilities to deliver the greatest value to battery asset owners, both on a short-term basis, minute-by-minute, and throughout the life of the asset.

“Batteries are unique in that they can be generation or load and respond to what the grid needs at any given time. They’re also incredibly fast and so can provide services for grid stability at a frequency level. But they can also be scaled in duration to provide what the grid needs, for very short-term responses or throughout the day to move energy from one part of the day to another.

“We are optimising the assets that are in the Superhub project, including the hybrid battery system and electric vehicles. We’ll be forecasting market prices, and coupled with our knowledge of ancillary service markets, recommending the commercial strategy for these assets and then executing it day-by-day.”

Using innovative new battery technology, Energy Superhub aims to deliver 20,000 tonnes of CO2 per year saving by 2021, rising to 44,000 tonnes per year by 2032.