Project Summary
It is essential that Protected Sites (PSs), e.g. hospitals and military sites, have a resilient energy supply to meet critical requirements. Most protected sites currently use fossil-fuels for heat and backup solutions.
For Distribution Network Operators (DNOs), supporting protected sites' transition to electrified heating will require providing additional capacity whilst maintaining the requisite level of resilience, involving major infrastructure investment. Utilising
a coordinated, flexible approach to heat demand offers the opportunity to offset some of these costs .
FORTRESS's hospitals use case demonstrates these diverse resilience needs,from critical-care to administrative buildings, analysing innovative heat flexibility strategies for DNOs.
Innovation Justification
Core Innovation
By understanding potential operating modes, grid impacts, electrification scenarios and flexibility market options, PSs will be better able to plan their heat decarbonisation journey and its impact on the electrical network, whilst maintaining appropriate levels of resilience. In turn this will help DNOs formulate their long term investment planning. This project will assess the challenges, obstacles and potential solution mechanisms which may exist to allow PSs to understand their electrification pathways and build a clear investment case.
This project is innovative because it's a unique collaboration between a DNO and a PS, combining real site data and the user's insights to fill a knowledge gap in solutions to deliver increased electrical capacity and heat flexibility simultaneously.
How Project Builds on Previous Research
Whilst decarbonisation technologies exist, the commercial framework to invest in these solutions does not exist for large PSs. Compliance with sector specific standards such as the Health Technical Memoranda add complexity to the challenge.
Discovery will map the current landscape and demands for the NHS, assess the impacts on the network of various scenarios and understand the business case for energy flexibility within the confines of critical resilience needs. Alpha will build on Discovery to test innovative technologies and identify suitable commercial models, minimising the network upgrade costs and therefore consumers bills and going beyond incremental innovation.
FORTRESS builds on Blue Light and Heatropolis, amongst other SIF and NIA projects, outlined in Question 12.
Technology, Integration and Commercial Readiness
Electrified heating is well established from technology providers. The integration and commercial readiness to invest in these solutions will be progressed in this project phase. Please see appendix.
SIF Funding
FORTRESS sits firmly in the SIF aims of reducing the cost of the energy transition for consumers, through not only addressing the specific innovation challenge, but also having a range of stakeholders involved and bringing new and novel ideas. FORTRESS will reduce network reinforcement costs for the consumers , bymodelling the implications and potential scale of the network impact across a range of decarbonisation scenarios.
The current BAU process is not a suitable route due to the uncertainty of the decarbonisation pathway for Protected Sites. Due to the critical dependencies on Protected Sites, new models of flexibility are seen as inherently risky and have not been tackled, making FORTRESS innovative.
Counterfactual The counterfactual to is uncoordinated and reactive network investment, resulting in higher costs for consumers.
(FORTRESS_Q5_Innovation Appendix.pdf (opens in a new window) (/application/10157199/form/question/45874/forminput/128809/file/805525/download)
Impacts and Benefits
Currently, there is insufficient understanding of the most suitable decarbonisation options for PSs. FORTRESS aims to improve stakeholders' capabilities to build scenarios with different technologies based on operational data, by producing more knowledge that can be used for future network planning. See Benefits below:
Networks:
-Improved decision-making through more accurate and updated information on the electrification challenges of large PSs, in particular for decarbonisation of heat. NHS England data (ERIC) shows that average acute hospital electricity consumption is 7.9GWh compared to 38GWh of gas - suggests significant future electrical demand increases where heat is electrified.
-Consideration of whole system solutions when considering critical customer needs (locational options, heat networks, cross-technology approaches to mitigate peak electrification scenarios).
-Potential reductions in network investment, due to enhanced network planning from direct coordination and engagement with PSs.
-Facilitating the energy transition of the sites from an inflexible demand user to a flexible demand, thereby reducing network constraints and increasing spare
capacity headroom.
Energy Consumers
-A more cost-effective approach than "over-engineering" the solution as per BAU reinforcement.
-Less socialisation of investment in new grid infrastructure to energy consumers through their energy bills. This aligns with Ofgem's policy of providing value formoney to energy bill payers.
Cost savings for PSs:
-Adopting innovative planning and operational procedures for PSs with electrified heat can reduce costs and CO2 compared to BAU.
-Understand the electricity market revenue streams, network planning mechanisms and whole system solutions for heat decarbonisation leading to anopportunity to create new flexibility revenue streams integrated into a site'sdecarbonisation plans.
-Reflect benefits of interruptible gas supplies to hospitals.
-Articulate the needs of PSs from electricity markets, to support their electrification investment planning.
-Greater DNO and PSs' coordination will lead to more streamlined site planning to enable decarbonisation plans to be achieved cost-effectively.
UK economy:
-Significant network flexibility unlocked in one sweep, making electrification more efficient (requiring less investment in grid upgrades), via the scalability of the approach for large sites. For example, there are over 200 significant large hospitals in England alone -- 100's MW+ nationally of potentially flexible load. Even short term flexibility intervals -- e.g. 5 mins - could be of significant benefit for DNOs and other network users.
-Long-term certainty of hospitals make it's flexibility more likely to be dispatched by a DSO compared to a typical industrial/commercial or domestic customer.
-An optimised, coordinated approach to ensure resilience for PSs.
