Since the early 1990s, there has been a steady reduction in the number of engineers working in this power sector, due to privatisation, restructuring and increased opportunities in other sectors. This has resulted in an unfavourable age profile in the industry and an anticipated future deficit. This situation was recognised and resulted in the creation of the IET Power Academy (PA) in 2004 to attract able and motivated students into power engineering courses at selected universities, using generous scholarships from the 16 partner power companies. Parallel to the engineering workforce decline in the electrical power industry, university-based research has also shrunk to a minimum in this area, with fewer academic staff available to teach undergraduates and perform research. This reduction in the pool of power engineers has inevitably had an impact on the availability of academic and research staff to:* teach electrical power engineering courses at undergraduate and taught post-graduate level. Of particular relevance here will be Power Academy and other home students as well as the overseas market in which the UK has been traditionally strong.* provide power networks engineering research solutions in the UK to respond to the challenges arising from power grid renewal, the impact of government low carbon policies, and to ensure future network resilience.This application for the creation of the Power Networks Research Academy (PNRA) will provide a future supply of academic/research staff for the UK university sector. The PNRA, by awarding PhD scholarships, will establish effective mechanisms to enable power network companies and related manufacturers and suppliers to work effectively with universities in helping to fund and support needed areas of research. The PNRA and the PA, thus, have a common aim, but with different destinations, of providing future electrical power engineers. It is anticipated that the PA offers a useful template for the establishment of the PNRA and, in this first application for funding, the universities involved in the PA will, similarly, be part of the PNRA consortium. From the industrial side, UK transmission and distribution network operators as well as manufacturers are supporting this proposal.

The Mission of Supergen Wind 2'To undertake research to achieve an integrated, cost-effective, reliable & available Offshore Wind Power Station.'This will be done under the four objectives:Reliability.Resource estimation.Scaling up of turbine sizes.Lifetime costs.The project will have two parallel Initiating Themes during the first two years. The first to deal with research into the physics and engineering of the offshore wind farm. The second to look more specifically at the wind turbine, building upon the lessons of Supergen Wind 1. In the third and fourth years of the project, the results of these two Themes will feed into a third Gathering Theme, which will consider the wind farm as a power station looking at how the power station should be designed, operated and maintained for optimum reliability and what the overall economics will be.

AI holds great promise in addressing several grand societal challenges, including the development of a smarter, cleaner electricity grid, the seamless provision of convenient on-demand mobility services, and the ability to protect citizens through advice and informed deployment of medical, emergency and police resources to fight epidemics, deal with crises and prevent crime. However, these promises can only be realised if citizens trust AI systems. In this fellowship, I will develop the fundamental science needed to build trusted citizen-centric AI systems. These AI systems will put citizens at their heart, rather than view them as passive providers of data. They will make decisions that maximise the benefit for citizens, given their individual constraints and preferences. They will use incentives where appropriate to encourage positive behaviour change, but they will also be robust to strategic manipulation, in order to prevent individuals from exploiting the system at the expense of others. Importantly, citizen-centric AI systems will involve citizens and other stakeholders in a feedback loop that enables them to audit decisions and modify the system's behaviour to ensure that effective but also ethical decisions are taken. Achieving this vision of citizen-centric AI systems requires several novel advances in the area of artificial intelligence. First, to safeguard the privacy of individuals, new approaches to understanding the constraints and preferences of citizens are needed. These approaches will be distributed in nature - that is, they will not depend on collecting detailed data from individuals, but will allow citizens to manage and retain their own data. To achieve this, I will develop intelligent software agents that act on behalf of each citizen, that store personal data locally and only communicate limited information to others when necessary. Second, to incentivise positive behaviour modifications and to discourage exploitation, I will draw on the field of mechanism design to model how self-interested decision-makers behave in strategic settings and how their actions can be modified through appropriate incentives. A particular challenge will be to deal with limited information, uncertainty about preferences and a constantly changing environment that necessitates incentives to be dynamically adapted via appropriate learning mechanisms. Finally, to enable an inclusive feedback loop involving citizens and other stakeholders, new interaction mechanisms are needed that can provide explanations for actions as well as information about whether the system is making fair decisions. While there is a wealth of emerging work on explainability and fairness in AI, this typically deals with simple one-shot problems. In contrast, I will consider more realistic and complex sequential settings, where actions have long-term consequences (including on fairness) that may not be immediately apparent. As part of the fellowship, I will work with a range of partners to put the research into practice and generate real impact. With EA Technology and the Energy Systems Catapult, I will work on incentive-aware smart charging mechanisms for electric vehicles. With Dstl and UTU Technologies, I will develop disaster response applications that use crowdsourced intelligence from citizens to provide situational awareness, track the spread of infectious diseases or issue guidance to citizens. With Siemens, Jaguar Land Rover, Thales and the Connected Places Catapult, I will develop new approaches for trusted on-demand mobility. With Fawley Waterside, I will work on citizen-centric solutions to smart energy and transportation in the Southampton area. With Dstl and Thales, I will explore further applications to national security and policing. Finally, with IBM Research, I will develop new explainability and fairness tools, and integrate these with their existing open source frameworks (AI Fairness 360 and AI Explainability 360).

The UK has a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050 relative to 1990 levels. While the potential role of energy storage to support integration of RES and help meet these challenging targets is well recognised, development of suitable frameworks that could facilitate energy storage rollout is still lacking. This is due to multiple factors that can be reflected in relevant Research Challenges that this project aims to address. These include: - An adequate understanding of commercial, regulatory, and institutional settings that can facilitate storage deployment; - Gaining insights into the true value streams that individual storage devices and coordinated portfolios of different technologies can generate for different parties across different markets; - Modelling interactions and maximising synergies among different energy vectors, and in particular heat and gas besides electricity, in order to unlock the flexibility of multi-energy forms of storage; - Developing suitable techno-economic models that can cater for the relevant operational and investment uncertainties that affect storage operators and owners and properly consider network and market constraints; - Understanding of wider impacts and social responses of different storage technologies, including public perceptions and environmental impacts. Our Vision is to develop a comprehensive framework, supported by innovative techno-economic modelling techniques capable to deal with different types of operational and planning uncertainties as well as network constraints, aimed at fostering sustainable business cases for different types of energy storage. Our analyses will assess how individual energy storage devices or aggregated portfolios of devices connected to different network levels can provide multiple simultaneous steady-state, dynamic services and power quality services and assess the relevant impact and value arising from these services for different market parties. We will consider explicitly multi-energy forms of storage, and in particular different types of electrical energy storage and thermal energy storage technologies, as well as innovative technologies such as power-to-gas. Our models will be tested in various technical, commercial and regulatory environments and taking into account socio-economic and environmental aspects, including public perceptions to different technologies. The MY-STORE project will strategically supplement the current research and bring a new perspective by providing much broader context, understanding and responses to the wide-scale deployment of energy storage. Our Ambition is to be the first in the world to provide such a comprehensive framework that can inform policy debates and the business community on the value and role of any storage technology in the transition towards more sustainable energy networks. Notwithstanding the generality of the framework put forward, the studies will focus on the UK situation, with time horizons from short to medium term (around 2035) and then opening up to 2050 and beyond. In fact, part of our ambitious plan is to bring out the value and role of energy storage and demonstrate how it could be possible to build business cases already in the shorter term and even for technologies that are commercially available today (e.g., thermal energy storage and different types of batteries), and then to facilitate development of appropriate regulatory and market environments for wider scale storage deployment (and possibly based on new technologies) to deal with the challenges of developing a truly low-carbon energy system. Our research will put the UK at the international forefront in this important field and provide a secure platform for future developments, also based on close collaboration with our industrial partners which represent a variety of established and emerging multi-energy storage technologies that are being already deployed or trialled in the UK.

Rapid transformation of Power Networks is only possible if industry can recruit highly trained individuals with the skills to engage in R&D that will drive innovation. The EPSRC CDT in Power Networks at the University of Manchester will educate and train high quality PhD students with the technical, scientific, managerial and personal skills needed by the Power Networks sector. Prof. Peter Crossley, whose experience includes leadership of the Joule Centre, will lead the CDT. This CDT is multidisciplinary with PhD students located in the Faculties of Engineering & Physical Science and Humanities. All students will first register on a "Power Networks" Postgraduate Diploma; when successfully completed, students will transfer to a PhD degree and their research will be undertaken in one or more Schools within these Faculties. During their PhD studies, students will also be required to expand their knowledge in topics related to the management, design and operation of power networks. Using the support of our industrial partners, students will engage in policy debates, deliver research presentations, undertake outreach activities and further their career development via internships. The CDT will deliver world class research and training, focused on the UK's need to transform conventional power networks into flexible smart grids that reliably, efficiently and economically transport low-carbon electrical energy from generators to consumers. Specific areas of research are: - Electrical power network design, operation and management The rapidly increasing need to integrate renewable energy into power networks poses numerous challenges, particularly cyclical and stochastic intermittency. This is further complicated by future proof buildings, decarbonisation of heat and transport, and other innovations that will change electrical demand. Existing Power Networks include a mixture of old and new plant, some of which is beyond design life. This may not be a problem at historical loading levels, but future visions involve increased power densities and changes in primary and secondary substation topology. Research on asset management and life-time extension is required to provide economical and reliable solutions to these issues. Integration of DC interties and Power Electronics within networks has been identified as key enabling technologies. Therefore projects on HVDC, power electronics, intermittent generation, energy storage, dynamic demand, intelligent protection and control and the use of data provided by smart meters and local/wide-area monitoring systems are required. - Power Network Operation, Planning and Governance Transmission and Distribution Operating Companies need projects on planning processes that co-ordinates land-use with other infrastructures. Projects include planning uncertainty and complexity, integration of modelling with geographical information systems, stakeholder behaviour, decision modelling and the impact of resource allocation and operating lifecycles. Projects on smart operational control strategies can simplify network planning and reduce the cost of implementing: demand response; combined heat and power; and district heating. - Changes to the pattern of energy demands and their effect on the power network Climate change will have an adverse effect on network reliability and projects are required to help network companies economically manage the electrification of heating, cooling and transport. Projects are also required on the interaction between energy vectors and network infrastructure with multiple uncertainties. - Cross cutting technologies Research in Mathematics and Management on stochastic dynamic optimisation techniques can be used to underpin projects on heat and electrical energy storage under uncertain price and supply conditions. Projects using a cognitive lens to uncover how large infrastructure projects can be delivered through meta-organisations are also required.