Project Summary
Our proposed project unifies two SIF Discovery Phase projects (hydrogen production and gas network digital twins). The Alpha Phase aims to explore further the commercial, societal and operational benefits that could be derived from the deployment of a unified "gas system of the future" digital twin within a distribution network.
Balancing supply and demand in an ecosystem of connected digital twins is fundamental to the future of the gas industry in the UK as we know it. Managing associated risk -- be it operational, technical or financial -- and security of supply given recent geopolitics is key as different supply chain segments are exposed to risk from partners in this chain. Relationships between the production and transportation of gas along with industrial and domestic demand need to be understood.
Aligned to the specific aims of the "data and digitalisation" challenge theme; our project will support the management of that variation of inputs to the gas network -- specifically hydrogen and biomethane -- as it becomes increasingly distributed and decentralised. It will support connectivity to renewables and other utilities; it will drive the transformation of network planning in the future; and it will be the trigger for the right-skilling of the future energy network workforce.
We believe it is important to capture "hearts and minds" and bring energy network teams along the digital twin journey -- any transfer of decision-making to a data-driven application depends on the criticality of the task and the level of trust users will have in our application. We have built a package of work to focus on this with key users from the gas transmission, gas distribution, gas production, and electricity as stakeholders on our project.
From a purely digital twin perspective, we believe that the highest value can be achieved through automation over time - but with higher complexity comes higher risk. We will focus on measurable business outcomes, ensuring that business needs rather than technology are driving the activities and that the networks start to focus on good quality data and information assets. That is a significant undertaking not to be underestimated. Our project has specific work package for this.
Whilst we know what many of the Net-Zero system architecture components could be - and we understand many of the deployment and integration challenges - there are still many unknowns. We aim to design this proposed ecosystem of connected digital twins with flexibility and extendibility at its heart. We believe that demonstrating the concept of connected digital twins is hugely exciting; aligned to the strategic vision of Ofgem and the networks; and completely aligned with the Gemini principles shared by the National Digital Twin programme. Ultimately, we expect our project outcomes to save money and reduce cost -- for example, by managing provision of electricity to the grid or to produce hydrogen, depending on price or capacity. Or when to carry out critical maintenance.
We are delighted that our partners are willing to be part of our project and all will play a more significant role in our concept. DNV will play a key role by leveraging further expertise from their pool of hydrogen and gas network experts along with their gas modelling, data transformation and analytics teams; IBM will lead the architectural and digital platform work packages, ensuring systems of record such as maintenance systems are critical components in a future digital twin landscape; and AWS will lead the build environment and deployment of AWS services for the Alpha prototype. In addition, both NGGT and NGESO bring critical insights from other projects; both will play a key role in governance work package.
Innovation Justification
With the recently revised ambition from the UK Government to achieve 10GW of hydrogen generation by 2030 and inject it into the gas network along with biomethane, the commissioning and connection processes for new gas plants must accelerate along with increased short term storage. As a result, extensive changes to cross-ecosystem planning and simplification of planning, modelling, and approvals across the entire supply chain are required. In effect, we are attempting to "solve" an enabling element of the energy trilemma -- namely finding a balance between security, affordability, and sustainability whilst managing energy supply and demand.
Decarbonizing the energy ecosystem increases dependence on intermittent energy sources. For example, a renewable energy generator can either sell its electricity or convert it to green hydrogen, depending on the market. Or a system operator can instruct a peaking plant to generate electricity within minutes to balance the electricity demand. Currently, the GDN does not have visibility of these intermittent energy sources. Under current regulations the gas system operator is prohibited from working with the electricity operator. Our solution could help Ofgem when developing the Future System Operator (FSO).
Our solution supports the management of variable inputs to the gas network (hydrogen/biomethane) as it becomes increasingly distributed and decentralised. Furthermore, by connecting renewables and other utilities, we will be able to simulate the market behaviour and its impact on a gas network and recommend the best consumer linked actions to maintain the security of supply. Our solution will achieve this by connecting different sets of systems and data in a unified interface, visualising the existing and operational capabilities of the connected system, and integrating information about the demand profile (current and planned).
Monitoring the remaining capacity in near real-time will allow optimization of asset utilisation and resulting rewards through improved responsiveness to changing demand dynamics. In addition, improved network modelling will enable "what if" scenario simulation to drive future design and faster decision making in a troubled situation with an impact to end customers. Currently, this is not possible due to a lack of interoperability between systems and minimal sharing data.
The impact of not doing this project is a detriment to the progress towards a functioning hydrogen and biomethane enabled economy. In addition, it would increase the risk of different companies developing separate solutions to manage their immediate needs resulting in the energy industry remaining siloed. We'd go so far as to state our project is a critical enabler for the industry to function in a decentralised model and evidenced this in our discovery phase feedback.
In terms of missing knowledge, we have not identified any specific gaps at this stage -- rather, we are positioning our project to bring together many previous activities to ensure previous innovation outcomes themselves do not contribute to said missing knowledge.
The innovation in this project revolves around connecting and interoperating multiple digital twins from different energy ecosystem partners using open industry standards -- combining hydrogen, biomethane, electricity and gas like never before. This is novel and risky but should be viewed in an opportunistic way, primarily since energy networks, producers and utilities have historically guarded data and avoided sharing information with one another as competition is promoted. Whilst current license conditions contained a presumed open clause, our project provides a real-world use case to networks to demonstrate their commitment to such requirements -- and do so collectively. Hence, we believe this is far from a typical business-as-usual activity and will force energy networks to work closely together to achieve a common aim -- decarbonization of our energy network as we strive for net zero in 2050.
Benefits
We believe that our project and the concepts within are essential for the UK to achieve both its low carbon hydrogen (10GW by 2030) and its biomethane (30GW by 2030) ambitions. It will demonstrate digital twin interoperability and connectivity to other utilities to take advantage of new insights.
Currently, there is an inability to rapidly share data held by energy networks, including information regarding planned maintenance and future developments. The development of our project will allow energy transporters to have a better strategic understanding of energy production, supply and demand, leading to a reduced carbon footprint as new gas is introduced much faster. Cost savings will also be passed onto the end consumer due to a better understanding of energy usage and supply/demand issues.
When done correctly, digital twins can be a critical enabler for the future gas system - but establishing trust in both data and actors in the energy mix is still lacking as our research has evidenced. We strongly believe our project can be a critical enabler to drive an increase in digital and data maturity in the energy sector -- it is wholly aligned with the ambitions outlined in the 2022 Energy Digitalisation Taskforce Report and would provide that narrative with a much-needed use case, connecting it to the UK Hydrogen Strategy and UK Energy Security Strategy. As such, we believe we should be bold and hence state that our project can be a major step towards resolving the Energy Trilemma -- that is, finding a balance between security, affordability, and sustainability in how we access and use energy in our daily lives. Balancing supply and demand is key and our project can enable that to happen.
Other tangible benefits that we believe our project will deliver are: giving energy networks a better understanding of their energy data and usage; reducing downtime through constant supply; managing the risk of productions failure; improving gas system asset efficiency; supporting targeted investment in future infrastructure/developments; and supporting the scaling of similar concepts beyond our own project use cases. We believe our projects can significantly benefit Government planning, highlighting areas for future strategic investment. Other benefits we have qualified and quantified in our 2x discovery phases are: identifying where new entrants (either producers or short term storage locations) are needed to be sited in the network; achieving full transparency on the gas source as well as other measurements such as quality and calorific value.
We can support the management of intermittent demand and supply and cross-sectorial energy integration by supporting optimum network planning decisions and increase in fixed asset utilisation. It provides the basis for interactions of cross-sectorial coupling of energy network and can influence decisions to manage network based on behaviour of renewable markets. Overall reducing the cost to the customer and increasing network availability / reducing outages.
Finally -- safety is paramount. By allowing improved, informed, decision-making on emergency incidents we'll also drive an overall reduction in downtime. Public safety is a key driver and will benefit from the combination of the two discovery phases.
In terms of quantified benefits: A UK-wide hydrogen economy could be worth £900M and create over 9,000 high-quality jobs by 2030 (ref UK Net Zero Strategy). The insights from digital twins such as ours will be a critical enabler for this and, we value our contribution at 5% or GBP45M and 20% of the job market. Further investment in hydrogen production with £100M for electrolytic projects -- we estimate that it is reasonable to expect our digital twin's potential economic value to be in the region of 20% of this value per annum
