Ellesmere Port in Cheshire is home to one of the UK’s largest industrial clusters – featuring major manufacturing employers, including oil refining, glass manufacture, nuclear enrichment, chemical production and automotive.

This concentration of industry means the area around Ellesmere Port consumes around 5% of the UK’s energy, with Cheshire West and Chester local authority being the fourth largest carbon emitter in the country with a climate emergency declared locally.

Energy Systems Catapult provided Whole Systems Modelling and Systems Engineering capabilities to help the Ellesmere Port – Cheshire Energy Hub consortium identify a portfolio of opportunities across renewables, hydrogen, carbon capture, energy storage and smart grids that offers long-term, sustainable investment opportunities as a pathway towards Net Zero.

An investment blueprint has been developed which could see £1 billion spent on low carbon projects in Cheshire and nearly 3 million tonnes of CO2 saved by 2030.

The Milford Haven: Energy Kingdom project is developing local markets to support the transition to hydrogen and renewables for a cluster of major energy infrastructure, including: Liquified Natural Gas terminals, RWE’s 2.2GW gas-fired power plant and National Grid gas pipelines stretching to Kent and Aberdeenshire.

Energy Systems Catapult is providing Energy Kingdom with expert guidance and support from the Systems Engineering team using our Dynamic Energy System Architecting (DESS) methodology.

We are developing a Systems Architecture will offer a mixture of decarbonisation pathways, while meeting local heating and transportation needs, including:

• Flexibility trading platform to lower costs for consumers using hydrogen-ready hybrid heat pumps and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles,
• Lifting constraints on local development of solar, wind and offshore renewable power generation.
• Novel system architecture allowing integration from national to local network levels
• Future integration of major natural gas infrastructure and current and future large-scale hydrogen infrastructure
• Hydrogen-ready features and technologies into the Port’s housing, commercial and renewables projects.

DESS will help design a solution that can be used as a template for for other Smart Local Energy Systems around the UK.  This approach will be made stronger by the incorporation of the views of all players in the hydrogen economy, from generation and storage, transport, import, export to the end users and everything in between.