About the Project
Hubs is a novel microgrid solution for railway stations, first of its kind in the world, to interface with both traction power supply system and local distribution grid to maximise the energy efficiency while providing cost-effective solutions for railway decarbonisation. The energy hub will integrate local renewable generation, recover regenerative power from trains approaching stations, and coordinate both traction and non-traction power supplies along the railway routes. The goal is to implement the energy hub solution to as many of the 2500 stations across over 10,000 miles of UK rail as energy and transport nexuses, connecting these hubs and their surrounding cities/communities to support green mobility and a future low carbon power grid that runs almost entirely on renewable sources.
Benefits for the Customers & SP Energy Networks
The power network users and clients will first benefit from the project due to enhanced performance and flexibility of the distribution network which is achieved by maximizing the utilization of renewable generations and by leveraging huge flexibility potentials from the energy hubs, including huge energy storage facilities in the hubs to coordinate the supply of 440GWh pa railway non-traction power and recover part of the 4TWh pa traction power (one third of which can be recovered in theory), and huge storage capacity of EVs in station car parks. The following benefits for the power network users and clients are addressed in this project:
- Reduce electricity bill;
- Greater robustness within the distribution grid;
- Availability for EVs to be charged and connected across 2500 stations with reduced fees;
- Reduction of CO2 emissions by 3 Mt CO2e p.a.;
- Better health conditions; and
- Reduced dependence on imported fossil fuels and hence reduced exposure and vulnerability to volatile fossil fuel markets.
Outputs
WP1 - Identification of stations for Ayrshire Energy Hubs and compilation of associated data for identified stations
WP2 - Report documenting the hub design specifications, outlining the circuit diagrams of the whole hub including size and ratings of the PV system, energy storage, all the converters, transformers switchgears and protection hardware at the level of details sufficient to ensure accurate simulation and hardware-in-loop validation.
WP3 - Detailed report on the hub design implementation plan and business model