Lack of safe and clean water is a long-standing challenges in much of Africa, and especially in Ethiopia and Kenya. Around 50 million people in Ethiopia lack access to safe water, and the country is currently suffering from its worst drought for 50 years, leaving some 18 million people in need of urgent aid. Similarly, only 41% out of the Kenyan population of ~ 47 million have access to safe water. Despite substantial undeveloped renewable resources, both Ethiopia and Kenya are energy poor. Ethiopia has around 2 GW of electricity generation capacity, meeting only 10% of national electricity demand, and reaching only 12% of the population. Kenya, with an installed electricity capacity around only 2.2 GW, has better grid connectivity, reaching about 55% of its households, but is still plagued by frequent, lengthy outages. In both countries, geothermal energy is vastly under-utilised and represents an exciting opportunity of addressing energy challenges, alleviating poverty, and promoting economic development. The Combi-Gen project aims to develop a novel geothermally sourced-combined power and freshwater generation technology, which promises to initiate a genuinely innovative shift in the engineering response to the twin challenges of energy shortage and water-scarcity in Ethiopia and Kenya. The research will provide a novel technology that can significantly improve the utilisation of the precious geothermal resources in Ethiopia and Kenya, and can produce both power and freshwater simultaneous to address the long-standing twin challenge of water and energy shortage in both countries and others of this kind. Once the developed Combi-Gen system is widely installed, it will contribute to sustainable development through reliable renewable energy and freshwater generation, and a reduction in poverty through promoting economic development and employment growth. Combi-Gen tackles a number of key priorities for development identified by the GRCF that relate to challenges of health, clean energy, safe water, sustainable agriculture, and foundations for inclusive growth. The core of the project is to tackle challenges associated with 'Sustainable infrastructure development'. The geothermal focus is strategically aligned with the government energy policy priorities on developing renewable and sustainable energy to meet power demand in both countries.

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.