Project lead: Changeworks
Local Energy Challenge Fund award amount: £24,950
Area: Glasgow City
Vision
Urban Link’s vision was to increase the benefits of local, low carbon energy economies to urban communities through a participatory demand management system. This would aim to reduce the price of electricity during periods of renewable generation for people in communities.
Project aims and objectives
The project planned to engage urban communities of approximately 1,000 households and identify opportunities to install new hardware to facilitate demand management. This would include the deployment of modern electrical and thermal energy domestic storage such as batteries and storage heaters.
UrbanLink planned to use advanced weather forecasting techniques developed by Heriot-Watt University to predict renewable energy generation at a national, regional and local scale and energy demand within the community. This would be used to predict future periods of renewable generation availability and opportunities for increased use of renewable energy within the community.
Moving demand into those periods would reduce peak heat load and provide flexibility to reduce electricity curtailment, as well as lessen the negative impact that wind intermittency and forecast errors have on the efficiency of non-renewable generation. This approach would allow electricity to be purchased more cheaply by participants during times of renewable energy generation and could be adapted to engage domestic and commercial customers in a wide variety of locations.
Outcome
The project was not awarded phase 2 funding.