Accelerating innovation in renewable energy to create a Net Zero energy system
Independent and technology-agnostic, whole systems approach to accelerating low carbon energy to market
Energy Systems Catapult offer world class systems engineering, working with government, regulators, industry, academia and innovators to overcome barriers and navigate the transition to Net Zero.
The Infrastructure and Engineering team offering specialist knowledge and practical experience in technology development and deployment, considering the technological, engineering, economic, regulatory and policy implications for innovations and investment decisions.
We have technical experts offering insights on Renewable Energy from a whole systems perspective:
- Renewables – expertise in solar, wind and marine generation, including: technology, systems and supporting infrastructure. Informing decision making to help give industry the confidence to target investments that accelerate technology adoption, and grid-scale impacts.
What we offer
Technology development and deployment
We provide evidence-based guidance to the UK innovation community to help maximise the value of:
- Innovation assessments for new technologies, such as performance and cost characteristics
- Technical due-diligence
- Innovation management capability to support the progression of technologies towards commercialisation
- Market positioning and partnering options to accelerate innovations towards commercialisation
- Techno-economic analysis to assess the competitiveness of technologies and associated innovations in decarbonised future energy systems.
Supporting market and policy development
Our independent, whole systems approach can help develop market and policy frameworks that support new technologies deployed to optimise integration, deliver new services and value streams using multiple energy-vectors (electricity, heat, gas, hydrogen, etc).
Case Studies
DTOcean+ marine energy project
DTOceanPlus was an ambitious EU project – funded by the Horizon 2020 – to develop and demonstrate an open source suite of design tools to accelerate innovation and commercialisation in the ocean energy sector.
The consortium brought together representatives of all key user and stakeholder groups and developers of Europe’s leading ocean energy sub-systems, devices and arrays.
Energy Systems Catapult provided expertise in Offshore Renewables, Systems Integration, Modelling, and Infrastructure and Engineering to develop a structured innovation design tool for concept selection of ocean energy systems.
This included:
- Best practice guidance for concept selection,
- Defining technical requirements in terms of digital information, data and the assessment process to fulfil user requirements,
- Developing, testing and verifying the Structured Innovation design tool.
The DTOcean+ (2018-2021) project – with a total budget of 8 million euros, developed and demonstrated a suite of second-generation advanced design tools for the selection, development, and deployment of ocean energy systems.
Users of the DTOcean+ suite of tools will be able to generate designs for innovative ocean energy technologies and deployments. These designs are optimised for a wide variety of key metrics including lifetime costs, reliability, availability, maintainability, survivability, performance, environmental impact and socio-economic impact.
They also balance technological and financial risk which, in combination with greatly improved cost effectiveness, ensure that ocean energy technologies become significantly more commercially attractive.
Integrating Tidal Energy Storage into the European Grid
The Integrating Tidal Energy into the European Grid (ITEG) project aims to generate a clean, predictable energy supply from renewable sources in areas with weak electricity networks.
Energy Systems Catapult is partnering with 15 cooperating organisations on this €11 million initiative, which is spearheaded by Interreg North-West Europe and led by the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) at their world-leading tidal test facility in the Orkney Islands off Scotland.
One innovative, multi-vector solution being tested by UK SME Orbital Marine Power. Their Orbital O2 next-generation 2MW floating tidal energy converter has been installed along with AREVA H2Gen’s new 500kW hydrogen electrolyser and a bespoke energy management system. This uses excess renewable electricity generation to create hydrogen that can be stored for use at a later date.
The consortium needed a partner to analyse the impact on the whole energy system – helping to create a robust business case for deployment at scale and to identify productive routes for technology development.
Energy Systems Catapult is drawing on:
- Local Energy Systems Modelling of Orkney using our EnergyPath® Networks tool
- National Energy Systems Modelling for UK and European analysis using Energy Systems Modelling Environment
- Systems Engineering team is looking at integration between the tidal turbine, electrolyser and local energy system to optimise for technical and economic performance
- Renewables & Marine Energy, Networks, Energy Storage and Hydrogen teams are contributing technical expertise
- Consumer Insights are supporting social studies with the local community.
Contact us – Clean Tech Engineering
If you are interested in working with us, contact us by completing the form and one of the team will be in touch.
Contact usWant to know more?
Find out more about how Energy Systems Catapult can help you and your teams
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Want to know more?
Find out more about how Energy Systems Catapult can help you and your teams