Proportional Investment Of Networks in Energy Efficiency Retrofit (PIONEER)

Summary

Learnings

Documents

The proposed project is linked to Innovation Challenge 4. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimate that EE has the potential to save up to £6bn a year across the system, yet rollout of thermal EE to date has been poor due to the lack of a business case.

The energy network innovation involved

is in demonstrating the real-life network impact of installation of additional thermal EE measures in domestic dwellings to mitigate load growth from electrification of heat
Developing and trialing commercial models by which the DNOs can fund the beneficial deployment of additional EE measures on their networks.
Integration of these novel commercial models with the DNO’s current procedures for managing constrained areas of the network

The project will be delivered by a consortium of:

National Grid Electricity Distribution -
Carbon Trust - an independent company with a mission to accelerate the move to a sustainable, low-carbon economy. They bring extensive experience in designing and managing relevant innovation programmes, including DEFENDER, BEIS’ Heat Pump Ready programme and the Green Homes Finance Accelerator, and in implementation including
expertise in building audits and retrofit and local area energy planning.
Frontier Economics - one of the largest Economic Consultancies in Europe, with Energy its largest sector specialism. Frontier worked with the CCC to develop pathways for heat pump take up, and modelled the roll-out of low-carbon heating and building retrofits for the National Infrastructure Commission. Frontier is currently working with NGED and Carbon Trust on DEFENDER.
West of England Combined Authority
Devon County Council
South West Energy Hub

It will be supported by an advisory panel of Energiesprong and Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network.

We expect additional project partners for Alpha and Beta phases, once further details of the demonstration location and commercial models to be tested have been defined.

The users of the innovation will be

Homeowners and landlords
local authorities
EE retrofit providers.

Problem Bring Solved

The overall aim of PIONEER was to develop commercial models which DNOs could use to bring forward thermal efficiency measures as a cost-effective alternative to reinforcement, to enable the network to handle greater volumes of LCTs. Doing so would help networks meet SIF challenge 3 (accelerating decarbonisation of major energy demands) at lowest cost. The Discovery phase focused on designing the types of intervention which could be trialled, and where such trials should be held for maximum impact.

Impacts and benefits

The main benefits PIONEER outlined at the application was focused on network cost savings from avoided network reinforcement and reduced flexibility procurement and direct cost savings on customer bills and carbon savings from avoided energy consumption. The process in which these benefits could be calculated was based on the work that was carried out in WP2, coming up with a longlisting criteria and a list of locations that could be utilized for a future trial. The DNO benefits were calculated, in the form of a ceiling price – which is the maximum amount a DNO could contribute to an energy efficiency measure in order for the benefits to be realised.

As part of the longlisting criteria, the point was to design an Energy Efficiency (EE) measure that could yield the maximal chance of success. As stated in the deliverable, for any trial to be a success it would need to:

· be representative of the types of property and area that a BaU scheme would target;

· cover a sufficiently wide variety of properties to enable uncertainties to be assessed;

· cover properties and areas which are not so unique that it is difficult to measure the additionality of the scheme; and

· be feasible to trial in the immediate future.

With these points in mind, it was apparent that a number of metrics were needed to determine the correct types of property a BaU scheme would target in addition to a range of house archetypes. An example of the list of metrics is seen in Table 1 of the end of phase report.

· be representative of the types of property and area that a BaU scheme would target;

· cover a sufficiently wide variety of properties to enable uncertainties to be assessed;

· cover properties and areas which are not so unique that it is difficult to measure the additionality of the scheme; and

· be feasible to trial in the immediate future.

As such, through the use of these metrics and putting in place a process that can long list a set of areas, WP2 produced a list of areas with subsequent ceiling prices and thus potential DNO benefits. They can be seen in the table below. Those not highlighted green were classed as outliers, meaning they were not classed as representable areas. Refer to Table 2 – Top 10 longlisted areas listed in the end of phase report.

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Proportional Investment Of Networks in Energy Efficiency Retrofit (PIONEER)

Project summary

Problem Bring Solved

Impacts and benefits

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