Integrating the Transport and Energy Systems

Manchester-based Evergreen Smart Power are an innovative Virtual Power Plant business, aggregating and controlling domestic energy loads resulting from the decarbonisation of transport and heating to suit specific customer, market, generation and grid conditions.

Evergreen’s solution for electric vehicles (EVs) can respond to grid conditions, to spread charging over off-peak hours, reducing the 7kW load of chargers that would otherwise put strain on the network at peak times, while ensuring that EVs are sufficiently charged when needed. The solution also optimises other loads, such as heat pumps and electric heaters.

The Energy Launchpad focused on helping Evergreen develop their future roadmap through competitive landscaping, consumer insights/trial and detailed business model analysis.

Exploring Evergreen’s Value Proposition with our Business Model Innovation team to help Evergreen develop their business model using insights from Competitive Landscaping work. This examined alternative target markets and revenue streams. Outputs were developed to be used for pitches to future investors.

Following incubation support from Energy Launchpad, Energy Systems Catapult helped Evergreen develop and deliver a follow-on project called Flexibly-Responsive Energy Delivery with 250 consumers.

UK Energy Research Centre commissioned Energy Systems Catapult and the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK to explore different pathways for reducing freight emissions from Heavy Goods Vehicles.

With little industry momentum and a severe lack of workable low emission prototype vehicles, the challenge was to develop an accurate and usable modelling tool to provide evidence that encouraged the UK transport sector to embrace cleaner alternatives.

Rather than focus on vehicle weights (like most existing models), we focused on the specific use cases (e.g. long-haul vs. local depot deliveries) to identify the technical specifications needed to achieve zero emissions and the infrastructure that will need to be in place to support the vehicle uptake.

The tool was used to engage the Department for Transport on:

• Including operators’ decision parameters and behaviours into modelling to better inform policy interventions and align operators’ choices with the required deployment of technologies and infrastructure.
• Assessing how policy decisions can support freight operators and  infrastructure roll-out to facilitate carbon-free powertrains.

Following project completion, we’ve used the tool to engage with the UK Department of Transport and wider industry to explore how they could benefit from enhanced freight modelling to inform policy making.