The SWITCH to Net Zero Buildings supports Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council's (NPTCBC) strategy to adopt the innovative design concept of 'buildings as power stations' developed at Swansea University (SU) for both homes and non-domestic buildings. NPTCBC's city deal project 'Homes as Powerstations' aims to future proof 10,300 properties, both new and retrofit, within 5 years by adopting net zero principles, reducing fuel poverty and the associated health implications. Demonstrating economic impacts of net zero policies, including sustainable regional supply chain growth, diversifying and integrating with existing industries; expected £251m GVA uplift; creating over 1800 skilled jobs; and £490m investment leveraged from public and private sectors over 15 years. Uncertainties around choice, effectiveness and cost benefits of renewable energy generation, heating and energy storage effect adoption of new technologies. Significant expertise exists within the established consortium of SU, Cardiff University and the University of South Wales, that will evaluate, scenario plan, scale up and progress opportunities with civic partners (NPTCBC, the Swansea Bay City Region and Welsh Government) and the supply chain represented by Net Zero Industry Wales. Inconsistent building management systems and performance monitoring of new technologies creates further uncertainty. Consortium expertise will provide unbiased monitoring solutions to understand the effectiveness. Circular economy and sustainable building material principles will also be a key consideration. Human-centred design principles must be built technology and control systems to ensure they are appropriate and adopted. Beyond the fabric and energy systems of buildings themselves, there are broader local and regional area energy plan implications which must be modelled to provide evidence and confidence to decision making processes. Active buildings are not designed to operate in isolation. They can use their ability to generate, store and release energy to time-shift supply and enable demand side response. They can trade energy to and from other buildings, national grid, industry or transport infrastructure. If they can locally manage peaks in demand (peak shaving) they can present a lower and more stable load to the grid, allowing centralised energy sources to focus on the demands of industrial decarbonisation (South Wales being UK's second highest emitting industrial cluster) and electrification of transport. This creates communities that are more resilient to changes in supply and demand. The supply chain for active buildings itself relies on the local foundation industries, which pay on average 28% higher than other sectors in this region of high socio-economic deprivation. Consortium expertise in multi-energy system integration can be used to assess these interactions and dependencies, creating robust and responsive services at differing scales. This systems approach allows exploration of opportunities for symbiosis across different sectors. To achieve a just transition to net zero it is critical that community involvement plays a key role in developments. Societal user acceptance expertise within the consortium covers the individual psychology of behaviour and sociology of group interactions, whilst its links to experts in narrative, culture and heritage help with storytelling. The theme crosses all EPSRC strategic objectives and is directly aligned with strategic priority engineering net zero and themes of energy and decarbonisation as well as manufacturing the future. The consortium has strength in thematic areas of advanced materials, circular economy and digital twins. This PBIAA will enable flexible and agile deployment of resources to unblock barriers to adoption of net zero buildings in the region, with economic benefits felt here being replicable in other regions, and will enable collaborative projects with non-consortium partners across the UK.

Urban energy systems play a crucial role in the economic, social and environmental performance of large towns and cities. There are many dense newly built urban areas in China, with limited space for renewables but resilience and clean energy with less air pollution are key issues. The UK has legacy urban energy infrastructure and decarbonisation has priority. All these challenges will place unprecedented requirements on the load demand and distributed generation of urban energy systems. Although the driving forces and the objectives of development of urban energy systems are different in the UK and China, sustainable, cost effective and reliable urban power supply is one of the key research topics in both countries. This project will focus on novel methods for sustainable power supply, and will address the following two key research challenges, each of which has associated objectives. (1) Conventional control approaches for urban power supply do not address the emerging opportunities offered by increased measurement and control of urban energy systems, do not consider the flexibility provided by other energy vectors, and do not proactively and self-adaptively deal with the inevitable uncertainties associated with the fast-evolving urban energy systems; and (2) current urban energy systems rely on external bulk power supply with low resilience, i.e. interruption of external power supply will have catastrophic consequences, and supply restoration from such abnormal events will be difficult and time consuming. Coupling of different energy vectors to maximise the benefits of system integration must be coordinated with decoupling of electricity networks (create islandable urban energy systems) during abnormal events to increase the system resilience by maintaining energy supply to un-faulted urban areas. The objectives of the project are to combine research strengths of the leading institutions in the UK and China to respond to the above challenges and: (1) investigate multi-zone and multi-energy evolving system and control architecture of urban energy systems. Digital twins will be used to model and analyse each multi-energy system that is connected to the urban electric power network. Their system coupling and system-integration potential will be identified and flexibility provision quantified; (2) develop a novel method for both current situational awareness and future situational forecasting of an urban energy system, based on the digital twin of each multi-energy system and network measurements; (3) investigate smart interconnection of different urban zones using Soft Open Points in medium voltage (MV) electricity networks for accurate, real-time and resilient power flow control, and smart interconnection of multiple players using distributed ledger technology (DLT) for fully decentralised trust-based control; (4) develop a multi-energy control strategy for an urban energy system, which employs situational awareness and smart interconnection methods to significantly improve performance and resilience of the urban energy system by setting up coordinated control and energy islanding capability; and (5) validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-energy control using hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test facilities and selected case studies, and provide cost and benefit analysis (CBA). The MC2 project will provide strategic direction for the future of sustainable urban power supply in the 2030-2050 time frame and deliver methodologies and technologies of alternative network control in order to facilitate a cost effective evolution to a resilient, affordable, low carbon and even net-zero future. The complementary, cross-country expertise will allow us to undertake the challenging research with substantially reduced cost, time and effort. The two-nation cross-fertilisation will make sure that the value of our research is for both developed and developing nations.

We are currently facing an unprecedented climate emergency threatening life on our planet. Limiting global surface temperature rise is key to ensure irreversible effects for nature and people are not triggered. For the UK, decarbonisation of the energy sector to mitigate climate change is a crucial ambition, becoming the first major economy to pass legislation to end its contribution to global warming by 2050 by reducing its carbon emissions to net-zero. Even though a significant emission reduction has been already achieved in the electric power sector, progress has been limited in other areas, such as heating (including space cooling), which accounts for over a third of UK emissions. Heating and cooling are central to our lives not only for comfort and daily activities, but also to facilitate productive workplaces and to run a variety of industrial processes. Decarbonising heating and cooling and reducing emissions from buildings are thus paramount to meet net-zero targets. Cooling decarbonisation has not previously received significant attention, but this is changing due to population increase and climate change. Summertime cooling of buildings is becoming increasingly important and consumer demand for greater comfort levels will also increase the energy used for cooling services. An increased requirement for cooling is anticipated, with the share of UK electricity used for cooling also expected to rise further, which could strain the electricity system. At the same time, summer electricity demand is changing with a surge in solar PV generation, causing concern for balancing the power system. Since cooling facilities are in general limited to building level, significant investments in cooling infrastructure and buildings are needed. Flex-Cool-Store brings together academics with complementary expertise on techno-economic, societal and policy aspects of electrical power supply and thermal energy systems. The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is to investigate the potential impacts of a growth in UK cooling demand and how this growth can be managed through proactive design and flexible operation of the cooling supply system and energy storage, and how the new demand can be served by an increasingly decarbonised electricity system. Underpinning this, public perception towards the adoption of cooling technologies within buildings and communities and consumer participation in flexibility provision from energy storage at household level will be explored via interviews and public workshops. Outcomes will be considered alongside pathways and policies associated with heat decarbonisation, and novel analysis using 'elite' interviews with policy makers will be conducted to consider the potential relationship between heat decarbonisation strategies, cooling and storage. This interdisciplinary approach will enable Flex-Cool-Store to address the issue of increasing demand for cooling and decarbonisation from multiple angles and to develop an even stronger evidence for best practice around buildings decarbonisation. Specific objectives of the project are: 1. Understanding cooling demand considering technical and socio-economic factors. Detailed studies will be conducted to understand how cooling demand might change over the next decades. 2. Quantifying the impacts of increased cooling demand on electricity networks. The extent to which supplying cooling will affect peak electricity demand will be quantified and its implications on network reinforcement will be investigated for selected case studies using data from real practical projects. 3. Investigating the flexibility provision to the electrical power system from integrating cooling technologies and storage. The interactions and synergies between cooling and electricity systems will be studied. How to adopt a coordinated approach for designing and operating energy systems of buildings so that the provision of flexibility can be maximised will be explored.

The critical challenge for contemporary urbanism is how cities develop the knowledge and capability to systemically reengineer their built environment and urban infrastructure in response to climate change and resource constraints. In the UK and elsewhere cities are increasingly confronted with, or have voluntarily adopted, challenging targets for increasing renewable and decentralised energy, carbon reduction, water savings, and waste reduction. Looking forward to 2020 and beyond to 2050, as current policy drivers and initiatives begin to bite, we need to envisage a systemic transition in our existing built environment, not just to zero carbon but across the entire ecological footprint of our cities and the regions within which they are embedded, whilst simultaneously promoting economic security, social health and resilience. Responding to this challenge in a purposive and managed way requires cities to bring together two strongly disconnected issues: what is to be done to the city (technical knowledge, targets, technological options, costs, etc) and how will it be implemented (institutions, publics, governance). We start from the perspective that the processes of urbanisation which underpin the development of cities are complex, and that urban environments can best be understood as complex socio-technical systems. Cities become 'locked in' to particular patterns of energy and resource use - constrained by existing infrastructural investments, sunk costs, institutional rigidities and vested interests. Understanding how to better re-engineer our cities and urban infrastructure, to overcome 'lock in' and facilitate systems change, will be critical to achieving sustainability. The core aim of the project is to develop the knowledge and capability to overcome the separation between the what and how of urban scale retrofitting in order to promote a managed socio-technical transition in built environment and urban infrastructure. The project will comprise a total of 5 Work Packages. Four interlocking Technical Work Packages: i) Urban Transitions Analysis: ii) Urban Foresight Laboratory (2020-2050); iii) Urban Transitions Management; iv) Synthesis, Comparison and Knowledge Exchange, and; v). the Project Management Work Package. The technical component of the research will explore urban scale retrofitting as a managed socio-technical transition, focusing on prospective developments in the built environment - linking buildings, utilities, land use and transport planning - and in so doing we will develop a generic urban transitions framework for wider application. The geographical focus will be on two of the UK's major 'city regions': Cardiff/South East Wales and Greater Manchester. Both areas have a long history of urbanisation and post industrial decline, and are actively seeking manage a purposive transition to sustainability through harnessing processes of master planning, regeneration, and economic development, and driving through significant programmes of retrofitting and infrastructural development, together with institutional and governance innovations, such as the establishment of Low Carbon Zones. The proposal brings together an experienced, interdisciplinary team of leading academic researchers, with commercial and public sector research users. The academic partners comprise: the Welsh School of Architecture (WSA), Cardiff University; Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), Salford University; the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) at Oxford Brookes University; and the University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering, Centre for Sustainable Development (CSD). Commercial collaborators will include Corus and Arup. Regional collaborators will include Cardiff and Neath Port Talbot Borough Councils, WAG and AGMA/Manchester City Region Environment Commission. National dissemination will take place through the Core Cities, CABE, RICS, and the national science advisor of DCLG.

The global energy sector is facing considerable pressure arising from climate change, depletion of fossil fuels and geopolitical issues around the location of remaining fossil fuel reserves. Energy networks are vitally important enablers for the UK energy sector and therefore UK industry and society. Energy networks exist primarily to exploit and facilitate temporal and spatial diversity in energy production and use and to exploit economies of scale where they exist. The pursuit of Net Zero presents many complex interconnected challenges which reach beyond the UK and have huge relevance internationally. These challenges vary considerably from region to region due to historical, geographic, political, economic and cultural reasons. As technology and society changes so do these challenges, and therefore the planning, design and operation of energy networks needs to be revisited and optimised. Electricity systems are facing technical issues of bi-directional power flows, increasing long-distance power flows and a growing contribution from fluctuating and low inertia generation sources. Gas systems require significant innovation to remain relevant in a low carbon future. Heat networks have little energy demand market share, although they have been successfully installed in other northern European countries. Other energy vectors such as Hydrogen or bio-methane show great promise but as yet have no significant share of the market. Faced with these pressures, the modernisation of energy networks technology, processes and governance is a necessity if they are to be fit for the future. Good progress has been made in de-carbonisation in some areas but this has not been fast enough, widespread enough across vectors or sectors and not enough of the innovation is being deployed at scale. Effort is required to accelerate the development, scale up the deployment and increase the impact delivered.