With the fast development of network technology and computing power, a huge amount of data has been generated in almost every aspect of our lives. The International Data Corporation reported that 90 ZB of data will be created each year by 2020, indicating that a big data era is upon us. A typical example is in the energy sector where a large amount of data is generated every day due to smart meter and other digitized changes. These are in turn changing the operation of the energy industry as big data analytics can provide efficient and effective decision support processes. The effect of decentralised generation in the future electricity landscape has and will continue to significantly increase the population of microgrids comprising renewable generation (wind and PV) and battery energy storage supplying local demand, with the excess being exported to the grid. The traditional control design for the energy management system of microgrids is based on a highly simplified model, whose results are highly suboptimal for such a complicated distributed system. Data-driven control could largely improve performance as there is enough data and computing power available today. In addition, energy management systems and market trading optimization packages provided by the big companies are generally designed for large utility and power generation companies and not tailored for smaller prosumers. Given the rapid growth of small prosumers, the PI will develop packages which are tailored to the micro level and meet their individual needs. The PI aims to develop a data-driven intelligent energy management system for a micro grid (connected to a main grid) consisting of wind and solar generation, batteries, and local load in order to provide an integrated, local, smart source of energy. It will use available information (e.g. wind data, weather forecast, energy pricing profile, balancing services pricing etc) to manage the energy generation/utilization and export on site to maximise the financial return to the stakeholder of the microgrid site, and provide balancing services to the System Operator (e.g. my project partner National Grid in the UK). Eventually this will benefit the environment and lead to cheaper energy to the end users due to the improved usage efficiency of renewable energy and the reduced system operation cost.

The production, storage, distribution and conversion of hydrogen is a rapidly emerging candidate to help decarbonise the economy. Here we focus on its role to support the integration of offshore renewable energy (ORE), a topic of increasing importance to the UK given the falling costs of offshore wind generation (with prices expected to drop to 25% of 2017 by 2023) and Government ambition. Indeed, the latest BEIS scenarios include more than 120 GW of offshore wind, and even up to 233GW in some scenarios. This brings with it significant challenges to the electricity infrastructure in terms of our ability to on-shore and integrate these variable energy flows, across a wide range of timeframes. Current ORE plants composed of fixed offshore wind structures are sited relatively close to land in shallow water and use systems of offshore cables and substations to transform the electricity produced, transmit it to the shore and connect to the grid. However, in order to exploit the full renewable energy potential and requirements for the 2050 net zero target, offshore wind farms will need to be sited further offshore and in deeper waters. This brings possibilities into consideration in which transporting the energy to shore via an alternative vector such as hydrogen could become the most attractive route. Hence we consider both on-shore and off-shore hydrogen generation. Not only can hydrogen be an effective means to integrate offshore wind, but it is also increasingly emerging as an attractive low carbon energy carrier to support the de-carbonisation of hard to address sectors such as industrial heat, chemicals, trucks, heavy duty vehicles, shipping, and trains. This is increasingly recognised globally, with significant national commitments to hydrogen in France, China, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Portugal, Australia and Spain in the last three years alone, along with the recent launch of a European hydrogen strategy, and the inclusion of hydrogen at scale in the November 2020 UK Government Green plan. Most of the focus of these national strategies is on the production of 'green' hydrogen using electrolysis, driven by renewable electricity. However, there remains interest in some countries, the UK being one example, in 'blue' hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from fossil fuels coupled with carbon capture and storage and hence a low carbon rather than zero carbon hydrogen. Today, 96% of hydrogen globally is produced from unabated fossil fuels, with 6% of global natural gas, and 2% of coal, consumption going to hydrogen production, primarily for petrochemicals, contributing around 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Currently green hydrogen is the most expensive form of hydrogen, with around 60-80% of the cost coming from the cost of the electrical power input. A critical factor that influences this is the efficiency of the electrolyser itself, and in turn the generator used to convert the green hydrogen back into power when needed. In this work we focus on the concept of a reversible electrolyser, which is a single machine that can both produce power in fuel cell mode, and produce hydrogen in electrolyser mode. Electrolysers and fuel cells fall into one of two categories: low-temperature (70-120C) and high temperature (600-850C). While low temperature electrolyser and fuel cell systems are already commercially available, their relatively low combined round-trip efficiency (around 40%) means that the reversible solid oxide cell (rSOC), which can operate at high temperatures (600-900C) is of growing interest. It can achieve an electrolyser efficiency of up to 95%, power generation efficiency of up to 65%, and hence a round-trip efficiency of around 60% at ambient pressure using products now approaching commercial availability. This project considers the development and application of this new technology to the case of ORE integration using hydrogen.