Aims

SUPERGEN Highly Distributed Energy Future (HiDEF) is an EPSRC Supergen research project being undertaken by a consortium of UK universities. Principally, HiDEF is concerned with developing approaches, technologies and policies to provide a revolutionised electricity system for the future, in accordance with the HiDEF vision of the future.The HiDEF project's stated aim is to design the "future power system that delivers sustainability and security through the widespread deployment of distributed energy resources and thus contributes to national and international ambition for a low carbon future."

The HiDEF Vision & The Cell Concept

In order to deliver the project's target, HiDEF envisions a fundamental change in the way electricity networks are structured. Extensive deployments of renewable generation technologies including wind generation and photovoltaic cells at all size levels will be integrated along with smart grids, demand side management and energy storage media. Facilitating these changes will be new regulation, updated policy and market designs that allow for fair remuneration for all participants..

Core to the realisation of the HiDEF vision of the future, is the reconfiguration of existing national interconnected electrical power grids into smaller cells. A cell may be considered to be an scaled down representation of an existing national grid with some presently unseen characteristics. Each cell will have the following components present: generation - both conventional and renewable, consumers, consumer-generators, distribution network operators (DNO), electric vehicle (EV) owners, policy makers, regulators and retailers..

Ideally, each cell would be self sustaining, however, given the inherent geogrpahically diverse nature of devloped nations this is unfeasible. Transmission Network Operators (TO) will still have a key role to play in ensuring bulk power transfers are completed as efficiently as possible..

Research Streams

In order to deliver the stated aims of the project, the following research streams have been defined..

Work Stream 1: Decentralised Energy

Understanding the collective resource and appraising its holistic performance..

Work Stream 2: Decentralised Control

Developing control measures tailored for distributed resources and integration of different energy vectors..

Work Stream 3: Decentralised Network Infrastructure

Architecture for integration of distributed resources and integration of different energy vectors..

Work Stream 4: Decentralised Participation

Markets and commerical arrangements for sustainable operation..

Work Stream 5: Decentralised Policy

Policy challenges and macro-economic impacts..