Digital Twins are becoming more and more prevalent within a multitude of sectors and potentially offer significant capabilities to address key aspects of the question: ‘How do we strategically decarbonise energy?’.

This high-level feasibility report was commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – Central Modelling Team following their creation and hosting of the Digital Twin symposium group in 2020.

The report provides context and outlines some key areas where Digital Twins could be applied within the energy sector, including a brief review of various Digital Twin initiatives, programmes, and toolkits; potential use-cases.

Key points

The Energy System Digital Twin Feasibility Study provides initial recommendations and proposes next steps with the intent to stimulate wider collaboration to scope and create a demonstrator to develop and validate the concepts:

• Digital Twin Workshop with Symposium Members

We will host a workshop with both members of the symposium group and wider industry stakeholders who may have access to useful datasets. This workshop will highlight the findings from this landscaping phase, as well as introduce the demonstrator concept, to gather initial feedback.

• Data Landscaping

We will carry out an investigation into the data which currently exists, and which data would need unlocking in order to create a Digital Twin System. These could be carried out as a collaborative effort with those working on the Modernising Energy Data Access (MEDA) project, who are looking into data use cases and the linking together of various datasets.

• Technology Assessment

We will carry out an investigation of potential providers of the software required for a twin system, and associated modelling capabilities required to create long term decarbonisation pathways. This may also require communications with those currently working with upcoming technologies, to explore how these may evolve over time and be incorporated into the twin.

• Digital Twin Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Proposed

The overall aim is to propose an MVP of a Digital Twin, which is able to prove the concept and real-world viability of how such a digital twin could help with long term decarbonisation pathways for the energy sector. The Digital Twin should be able to incorporate dynamic data sets to better outline the ways in which we are able to achieve net zero, and the policy development required to incentivise organisations to aid in this realisation.