A thriving, low carbon hydrogen sector is essential for the UK's plans to build back better with a cleaner, greener energy system. Hydrogen has the potential to reduce emissions in some of the highest-emitting and most difficult to decarbonise areas of the economy, which must be transformed rapidly to meet Net Zero targets. To achieve this, large amounts of low carbon hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels will be needed. These must be stored and transported to their point of use. There remain significant research challenges across the whole value chain and researchers, industry and policy makers must work collaboratively and across disciplines to drive forward large-scale implementation of hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels as energy vectors and feedstocks. The flagship UK-HyRES hub will identify, prioritise and deliver solutions to research challenges that must be overcome for widespread adoption of hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels. It will be a focus for the UK research community, both those who are already involved in hydrogen research and those who must be involved in future. The UK-HyRES hub will provide a network and collaboration platform for fundamental research, requiring the combined efforts of scientists, engineers, social scientists and others. The UK-HyRES team will coordinate a national, interdisciplinary programme of research to ensure a pipeline of projects that can deliver commercialisation of hydrogen and alternative liquid fuel technologies that are safe, acceptable, and environmentally, economically and socially sustainable, de-coupling fossil fuels from our energy system and delivering greener energy. We intend that, within its five-year funding window and beyond, UK-HyRES will be recognised internationally as a global centre of excellence and impact in hydrogen and alternative liquid fuel research.

It is important for the Government to be able to predict the future energy needs of UK industries, homes and transport to ensure sufficient supply. At the same time, the UK needs to plan to reduce energy use in order to meet climate change reduction targets. At the moment the UK Government uses an Energy Demand Model which makes future energy predictions based on estimates of economic growth, the price of fuel and the number of households there will be in the future. This technique for predicting future energy needs is deficient, because it fails to take account of the fact that household demand for goods and services is the major driver of the economic performance of industry, and that the way households spend today is likely to be very different in the future. My fellowship takes a 'whole systems' approach to understanding the UK's demand for energy. The link between household spends and industrial energy use can be determined by quantifying the total energy required in the supply chain of producing a product. It is also possible to capture the energy that is embedded in goods exported abroad and goods imported to the UK from other countries with very different energy efficiency standards in their factories. I will develop a new indicator of energy demand: 'the UK's Energy Footprint' which shows the full amount of energy associated with products bought by UK consumers between 2005 and 2015. I have met with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to ensure that this new indicator will be reported alongside the Carbon Footprint. Instead of simply looking at the changing goods and services bought by an average household, this fellowship will consider the differing expenditure profile of up to 60 different household types between 2005 and 2015. For this, I will use geodemographic expenditure profiles developed by CallCredit, a credit reference company. The main user of geodemographic data is the business sector understanding their consumers, so it is important that the data is current and constantly kept up-to-date. Producers of this type of data do not keep previous years' profiles as a readily available product. This means that their data has never been used to understand the changing geodemographic profile in the UK or elsewhere. I have made an agreement with CallCredit to exclusively acquire a decade's worth of expenditure data from their archive. This means that it will be possible for the first time to determine whether the energy needs of the UK have altered due to households buying different types of products or whether the change is due to the mix of households in the UK changing. I will use mathematical analyses to calculate the drivers of the change in UK energy demand. The research will be able to determine what effect the recession had on the energy demand of different households. I will then focus on using predictions of the changing household types and predictions on how lifestyles may change in the future to estimate what the UK's demand for energy will be in 2030. There is uncertainty as to how the UK's infrastructure might have to change in order to cope with an aging population or the trend for homeworking. This fellowship will address this by determining the energy requirements of these futures by forming scenarios which calculate the UK's energy needs when there are greater proportions of these types of household present in the UK's demography. Outputs from this research will also be used to verify the BEIS's future energy demand scenarios and provide new inputs to their Energy Demand Model. This work therefore has great importance in ensuring the UK can meet the energy needs of its businesses and people, and become more sustainable, now and in the future.

METER addresses a fundamental research question: "What is the temporal relationship between electricity consumption and household activities?". To date this relationship is still poorly understood. METER will address this gap by collecting electricity consumption data in parallel with time-use information using adapted smart phone technology. A detailed understanding of 'what electricity is used for', especially during peak demand periods, is important in addressing emerging system balancing challenges and to develop appropriate policy frameworks and business models leading to the cost effective integration of low-carbon generation. At present electricity is supplied based on a 'predict and provide' paradigm - so long as we can forecast 'how much' electricity is required at any one time, the fleet of mostly fossil fuel based plants can be scheduled to deliver. Little knowledge about the end-uses of energy has been required for this approach. With low carbon sources, such as nuclear, solar and wind, more flexibility may be required from the demand side. Understanding the end use activities supported by electricity becomes more important when seeking to reduce or shift the timing of consumption. Studies attempting to measure electricity use at the appliance level have so far been limited in their scale by the cost and complexity of instrumentation. The absence of statistically robust consumption data has been noted as limiting the UK's world leading research in this area. METER develops a new approach to collect electricity consumption in parallel with time-use information. Smart phone technology, developed by colleagues at Oxford, will be deployed to measure electricity consumption at 1 second resolution and ask participants about the activities they undertake at critical times of the day. The use of smart phones allows this process to be performed at unprecedentedly low costs, such that over 2000 households can be included in the study. This scale is important, because electricity uses are highly diverse and only a sufficiently large sample allows to develop statistically significant evidence for researchers and policy makers. The concurrent collection of time-use and electricity consumption can improve the accuracy of time-use research and provide new insights into the use and timing of electricity consumption and its relationship with household activities. The data and the analytical tools developed by METER will provide much needed insights into the timing of electricity uses, which can underpin a wide range of future research priorities. Among them are emerging energy system balancing challenges and broader policy challenges relying on statistically robust information about the relationship between energy use, demographics, lifestyles and their transitions over time. Findings and insights from METER trials will become publicly available as part of a public outreach campaign, including interactive online tools to explore how Britain uses its electricity and what the public can do to support the transition towards a lower carbon future.

Energy systems are vitally important to the future of UK industry and society. However, the energy trilemma presents many complex interconnected challenges. Current integrated energy systems modelling and simulation techniques suffer from a series of shortcomings that undermine their ability to develop and inform improved policy and planning decisions, therefore preventing the UK realising huge potential benefits. The current approach is characterised by high level static models which produce answers or predictions that are highly subject to a set of critical simplifying assumptions and therefore cannot be relied upon with a high degree of confidence. They are unable to provide sufficiently accurate or detailed, integrated representations of the physics, engineering, social, spatial temporal or stochastic aspects of real energy systems. They also struggle to generate robust long term plans in the face of uncertainties in commercial and technological developments and the effects of climate change, behavioural dynamics and technological interdependencies. The aim of the Centre for Energy Systems Integration (CESI) is to address this weakness and reduce the risks associated with securing and delivering a fully integrated future energy system for the UK. This will be achieved through the development of a radically different, holistic modelling, simulation and optimisation methodology which makes use of existing high level tools from academic, industry and government networks and couples them with detailed models validated using full scale multi vector demonstration systems. CESI will carry out uncertainty quantification to identify the robust messages which the models are providing about the real world, and to identify where effort on improving models should be focused in order to maximise learning about the real world. This approach, and the associated models and data, will be made available to the energy community and will provide a rigorous underpinning for current integrated energy systems research, so that future energy system planning and policy formulation can be carried out with a greater degree of confidence than is currently possible. CESI is a unique partnership of five research intensive universities and underpinning strategic partner Siemens (contribution value of £7.1m to the centre) The Universities of Newcastle, Durham, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Sussex have a combined RCUK energy portfolio worth over £100m. The centre will have a physical base as Newcastle University which will release space for the centre in the new £60m Urban Sciences Building. This building will contain world-class facilities from which to lead international research into digitally enabled urban sustainability and will also be physically connected to a full scale instrumented multi vector energy system. The building will feature an Urban Observatory, which will collect a diverse set of data from across the city, and a 3D Decision Theatre which will enable real-time data to be analysed, explored and the enable the testing of hypotheses. The main aim of CESI's work is to develop a modular 'plug-n-play' environment in which components of the energy system can be co-simulated and optimised in detail. With no technology considered in isolation, considering sectors as an interlinked whole, the interactions and rebound effects across technologies and users can be examined. The methodology proposed is a system architect concept underpinned by a twin track approach of detailed multi-vector, integrated simulation and optimisation at various scales incorporating uncertainty, coupled with large scale demonstration and experimental facilities in order to test, validate and evaluate solutions and scenarios. A System Architect takes a fully integrated, balanced, long term, transparent approach to energy system planning unfettered by silos and short term thinking.

This work has two principal aims: a) to develop a roadmap that will help the Research Councils and others to plan their research activities in ways that will contribute to the achievement of the UK's energy policy goals; and b) to conduct a programme of research that will assess how effectively different countries conduct their energy research and development (R&D) activities in different technology areas with a view to learning lessons for the more successful execution of policy. The roadmap will consist of a top-level document which will act as a bridge between higher level energy strategies and more specific R&D plans for individual technologies. The aim is to improve the coherence of energy policy on the one hand and energy research activities on the other. The top-level document will be supplemented by web-based roadmaps for individual technology areas such as carbon capture and storage or different forms of renewable energy. Demand-side technologies, for example for transport and buildings, will also be covered. Given the interplay between technology and human behaviour, especially on the demand side, social scientists as well as scientists and engineers will be involved. The roadmaps will address both technological needs and needs for training and capacity-building. The roadmaps will be produced through interviews with policymakers and R&D funders and through a mixture of facilitated technical workshops and strategic workshops engaging a wider range of stakeholders. The first task in the research programme is to map out "systems of innovation" for different energy technologies in different countries. We intend to cover a small number of EU countries, the US and China. The mapping will cover institutions and their roles, networks and research capacity. The task will be carried out through documentary analysis and interviews in the relevant countries. We will also look at systems of innovation internationally, for example through education and training, and the activities of multinational companies. The second task will be to develop and analyse measures for the effectiveness of R&D activities in different systems of innovation. Many countries intend to achieve fundamental transitions in their energy systems, for example by moving to low-carbon technologies. We will draw on a new branch of innovation theory, "transitions theory", to develop measures of effectiveness. Finally, we will review hypotheses and findings from the analysis of the effectiveness of R&D activities with experts and draw conclusions about how the success of energy R&D programmes and their contributions to energy policy can be improved.