Amp X tested their autonomous, digital energy assistant ‘ALICE’ with a trial in our Living Lab. The ALICE platform aims to help UK households reduce their energy costs and carbon intensity through autonomous demand-side-response decisions based on real-world market signals.

ALICE will schedule energy usage by household devices’ when the energy is greenest and cheapest, with the aim that households will benefit by providing flexibility to local networks to improve grid resilience and maximise renewable energy usage.

Watch the case study:

Installed in 60 Living Lab homes, Energy Systems Catapult is working with Amp X to analyse and validate the performance of ALICE, including:

• ALICE’s potential to facilitate demand-side response, provide carbon savings, and reduce energy costs.
• The consumer experience – providing real-world consumer insight and feedback on ease of installation/set up/removal, usability and the quality of the consumer-interface.
• The interface between the digital energy assistant and various in-home devices, including Electric Vehicles, smart meters, appliances, and Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning controls.

“Consumer engagement is a key barrier to demand–response as a scalable non–wire alternative. Energy Systems Catapult’s analysis helped us validate what features of our solution work best for different user–types and properties to help sell the benefits to the consumer market.”
Dr Irene Di Martino
Head of Amp X

Thermal storage manufacturer Sunamp is to receive £9.25 million to develop and trial its advanced thermal storage system in 100 homes across the UK. Sunamp will extend their existing heat battery to provide increased storage duration and capacity and pair it with household energy systems to tackle periods of low renewables generation on the grid.

The funding is awarded through the Longer Duration Energy Storage Demonstration programme, part of the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP) from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy of which provides funding for low-carbon technologies and systems.

A heat pump will charge renewable heat into large capacity time-shifting thermal storage, delivering space heating and hot water on demand. The bulk of input electrical energy is from offsite wind energy. Customers will have the option of part ownership of a wind farm through Ripple Energy. The proposed system uses smart control logic from myenergi and a significantly large thermal storage from Sunamp to overcome lulls in wind energy supply.

In addition, the Living Lab now connects to our new Whole Energy Systems Accelerator, allowing us to test the benefits that Sunamp’s heat battery technology brings to the wider electricity network, utilising real-time data on real world household behaviour.

Watch the WESA video:

Social innovation agency, Nesta in Scotland, commissioned Energy Systems Catapult to help Scotland better understand which dwellings are most and least well suited to the transition to ground and air source heat pumps.

We used our first-of-a-kind Home Energy Dynamics (HED) modelling tool to test some Nesta’s assumptions. HED can simulate the energy and carbon savings provided a product with a range of housing types and their constituent parts – such as heating and hydraulic systems, building fabric, smart controls, weather and consumer profiles.

For Nesta our HED modelling found:

• Low-carbon domestic heating options will be costly to install.
• The running costs and effectiveness of heat pumps will vary in different types of properties.
• There is a portion of Scotland’s housing stock for which heat humps may not be a viable heating option at all.
• Older tenement flats (which are around 28 per cent of urban housing stock in Scotland) pose particular problems to become sufficiently energy efficient and to site and install a heat pump.

Energy Systems Catapult collated energy efficiency data for several housing archetypes and conducted detailed HED modelling for heating a tenement flat in different retrofit/upgrade scenarios.

The report How to Heat Scotland’s Homes found that:

• Housing stock in Scotland has a poor standard of energy efficiency with over 70 per cent of dwellings having an EPC rating D or C and 15 per cent having the lowest ratings of E, F or G.
• Barriers to installation of heat pumps, including cost, supply, public awareness and practicalities such as space, exist across all housing types in Scotland.
• Older, pre-1914 housing stock such as tenement blocks would require substantial and costly energy efficiency measures including to the fabric of the buildings (often prohibited by current planning restrictions), in order for heat pumps to deliver an acceptable standard of comfort and cost.

Warm Home Prescription® is a new service first piloted by Energy Systems Catapult and Gloucestershire NHS, aiming to help vulnerable people with both low incomes and existing cold-sensitive health conditions, to stay warm in their homes, reduce hospital admissions and save NHS costs.

Millions of people in the UK have health conditions – such as respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses – that are made worse by living in a cold home. With over 10,000 people dying each year in England and Wales – as a result of living in cold homes.

In 2022-2024, Energy Systems Catapult, in partnership with local NHS partners and local energy advice organisations, undertook the largest trial of its kind, supporting over 820  vulnerable and low-income households in Aberdeen, Middlesbrough, Gloucestershire and London. These groups are identified in the national health and social care advice.

The service works to deliver rapid, practical help.

• NHS teams (including social prescribers and complex care teams linked to GP surgeries) identify eligible patients.
• Patients are contacted by the NHS and offered a ‘warm home prescription’ to be delivered by local energy advisors who credit their energy account.
• Patients can immediately start heating their home to a healthy temperature.
• Further home energy upgrades are arranged where possible.

The results show emerging evidence of a decrease in use of primary care services and an increase in uptake of energy efficiency and low carbon heating measures.