Mixergy has designed an innovative, smart hot water storage tank that allows consumers to heat only the water they need, in contrast to conventional hot water tanks which heat all or nothing. This saves on energy, cost and carbon emissions.

Energy Systems Catapult utilised our Home Energy Dynamics modelling toolkit to help Mixergy simulate how their hot water tank interacts with varied building and occupancy profiles without needing to deploy the innovation in the real world.

HED has been tested on a number of homes to date, to demonstrate a very strong correlation between predicted and measured energy performance, which supports validation work undertaken with Salford University’s Energy House.

David White, Head of Commercial Operations, Mixergy, said: “Home Energy Dynamics allowed us to test Mixergy’s product when deployed in a varied ecosystem of products and applications, which is often challenging to model. These insights are extremely valuable when articulating to prospective clients and stakeholders the full impact of deploying smart home technologies.

“We were really impressed with the accuracy of the model and also how it is able to quickly identify effectiveness of a solution without need for a full laboratory set-up.”

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: