Project Summary
HyCoRe will identify UK regions with strong potential for green hydrogen, produced from offshore-wind and injected into the onshore gas network, to offer a more economic and deliverable solution than offshore wind farms producing electricity directly. To achieve this, HyCoRE will focus on three key research areas:
National modelling: identifying high-potential areas based on offshore/onshore constraints and opportunities.
Modelling of a selected regional specific solution: understanding infrastructure solutions that will provide connectivity between offshore wind production areas and energy consumers/gas network.
Technical challenge assessment: identifying technical challenges that may impede deployment and design/optimisation of test/validation solutions to de-risk technology pathways
Innovation Justification
HyCoRe proposes novel/ambitious innovation for future energy systems well aligned with: the challenge area of improving energy system resilience and robustness; and the theme of strengthening energy system robustness to support efficient new infrastructure roll out for the following reasons:
It will analyse resilience through Monte Carlo modelling and propose diversification of energy options (hydrogen and electricity) for offshore wind energy. Solutions involving decentralisation and grid flexibility (including minimising offshore wind curtailment) are also considered. HyCoRe explores several technical challenges (energy storage impact analysis, storage facilities, and enhanced interconnections between energy vectors and the wider electrical and gas networks used for energy transmission/distribution). HyCoRE will achieve this through multiple stakeholder collaboration/coordination (including electricity grid and gas network companies).
HyCoRe's Discovery phase provided several takeaways to inform the Alpha phase scope: the benefits of enhancing existing testing and demonstration infrastructure (for optimisation in WP4); further development/use of analysis tools (for WP2 offshore/onshore zone considerations); and deeper cost benefit analysis value (feeding WP3 technical challenges work and WP4 infrastructure optimisation).
Discovery also highlighted the need for detailed routes to market considerations (including WP5 markets and regulation studies).
HyCoRE's Discovery phase allowed the project to work openly with an Advisory Board. As well as supporting a webinar and Show and Tell promotional activities, the Advisory Board interaction led to full partner inclusion of Arup and Unasys in the Alpha phase. The use of their modelling tools/methods alongside Kinewell's WP2 input provides an opportunity for accelerated (not incremental) innovation in modelling of offshore/onshore zone considerations.
Innovative aspects of HyCoRe are largely covered in WP2 to WP4 inclusive. WP2 allows HyCoRe to combine modelling capability from Arup/Kinewell/Unasys (further details in Appendix_Q3_Innovation_justification). Arup's SCALE tool will be used to combine offshore and onshore modelling for zone considerations at a National level for the first time. Kinewell will use these findings to consider infrastructure solutions through regional level modelling. In WP3, OREC will analyse innovation in offshore wind hydrogen production in the areas of optimised integration, ancillary service provision, hydrogen compression and offshore maintenance. WP4 focuses on enhancement of validation and demonstration infrastructure and focuses particularly on existing infrastructure of OREC and NGN. Compared to current state of the art, Arup's SCALE tool will be enhanced to consider onshore and offshore zone consideration modelling at a National level.
Similarly, OREC's grid emulation infrastructure and NGN's Low Thornley site design will be optimised for hydrogen-based technology validation and demonstration. The ability to virtually connect the sites will also be investigated; a clear step beyond state of the art. The TRL status of software tool activities (e.g., SCALE) and the validation/demonstration infrastructure will be enhanced by the Alpha phase. SCALE is already commercially ready, but its capability will be enhanced by Alpha. The IRL of the validation and demonstration infrastructure will be progressed by the investigation to virtually connect infrastructure as part of WP4's facility specification and costing tasks.
HyCoRe believes National modelling coupled with regionally-based infrastructure for validation/demonstration is an appropriate size/scale to gain investor and wider stakeholder confidence in the innovations presented. Subsequently, regional demonstration can be replicated/scaled to a National level if successful under SIF. As a new-to-market technology development project, an Alpha phase project would be more risky to fund by other means, particularly when building from the Discovery phase. The project involves diversification of partner business as usual activities, thus requiring SIF-type funding. HyCoRe has considered counterfactual solutions such as market-led organic growth of offshore wind producing hydrogen. This has been disregarded as it risks ongoing curtailment problems for offshore wind, siloed technology development and non-optimised solutions from a wider, holistic energy systems perspective.
Impacts and Benefits
The current position is that there are plans to integrate a large scale roll out of offshore renewable energy, to 50 GW by 2030, using the electrical network. Plans for this have been outlined in National Grid ESO's Holistic Network Design, which has an estimated investment requirement of £32bn.
By minimising network upgrade costs via identifying the most strategic locations to generate hydrogen from offshore wind and integrate it with the gas network, HyCoRe will contribute to a lean energy system, reducing the risk of building a sub-optimal system, with underutilised components. This will also reduce the gas/electricity network's capital/operational costs, and consumer bills.
Based on the high-level analysis in the CBA spreadsheet, using hydrogen technology has the potential to have substantial savings on network costs and have a net present value of about £19bn. An understanding of the costs of hydrogen systems has come through project delivery.
Revenues--creation of new revenue streams
Presently, there are few links between the gas and power networks, other than gas fired power stations. With electrolysis allowing electrical energy to be transferred to the gas network, new revenue streams will be created, so that one can support the other, further improving network resilience. Additionally, energy storage services could be provided by new companies, at various UK locations where hydro-power is not possible. During low UK demand periods, there is potential to export hydrogen abroad; an export opportunity that does not currently exist and that will open revenue streams for all companies involved.
Revenues--improved access to revenues for users of network services
For industrial scale green hydrogen from offshore wind to supply the gas network, the market regulation must be set-up, from scratch, to enable it in a safe, efficient, and fair way. HyCoRe will seek a detailed understanding of existing regulation to
advise policymakers on the regulatory changes required to provide greater confidence to both the energy networks and offshore wind developers and to allow the development of the market. This will ultimately benefit the consumer.
Further, some traditional network service users could become network providers (e.g., small-scale distributed generation allowing users to sell surplus energy back to providers). In this case, users could install a hydrogen electrolyser and provide energy storage capacity that could be sold back to the traditional energy provider in the form of new services.
New to market--products, processes, and services
Energy storage devices are becoming more common on the network. HyCoRe will highlight where they can best contribute in terms of scale, location, etc., supporting favourable business model development and reducing time-to-market. It will also highlight where additional enabling technologies in the energy networks (e.g., converters/control-systems/monitoring solutions) are required in the system (windfarm/electrolyser/wider gas and electricity network) and support their validation/commercialisation.
