The CDT proposal 'Fuel Cells and their Fuels - Clean Power for the 21st Century' is a focused and structured programme to train >52 students within 9 years in basic principles of the subject and guide them in conducting their PhD theses. This initiative answers the need for developing the human resources well before the demand for trained and experienced engineering and scientific staff begins to strongly increase towards the end of this decade. Market introduction of fuel cell products is expected from 2015 and the requirement for effort in developing robust and cost effective products will grow in parallel with market entry. The consortium consists of the Universities of Birmingham (lead), Nottingham, Loughborough, Imperial College and University College of London. Ulster University is added as a partner in developing teaching modules. The six Centre directors and the 60+ supervisor group have an excellent background of scientific and teaching expertise and are well established in national and international projects and Fuel Cell, Hydrogen and other fuel processing research and development. The Centre programme consists of seven compulsory taught modules worth 70 credit points, covering the four basic introduction modules to Fuel Cell and Hydrogen technologies and one on Safety issues, plus two business-oriented modules which were designed according to suggestions from industry partners. Further - optional - modules worth 50 credits cover the more specialised aspects of Fuel Cell and fuel processing technologies, but also include socio-economic topics and further modules on business skills that are invaluable in preparing students for their careers in industry. The programme covers the following topics out of which the individual students will select their area of specialisation: - electrochemistry, modelling, catalysis; - materials and components for low temperature fuel cells (PEFC, 80 and 120 -130 degC), and for high temperature fuel cells (SOFC) operating at 500 to 800 degC; - design, components, optimisation and control for low and high temperature fuel cell systems; including direct use of hydrocarbons in fuel cells, fuel processing and handling of fuel impurities; integration of hydrogen systems including hybrid fuel-cell-battery and gas turbine systems; optimisation, control design and modelling; integration of renewable energies into energy systems using hydrogen as a stabilising vector; - hydrogen production from fossil fuels and carbon-neutral feedstock, biological processes, and by photochemistry; hydrogen storage, and purification; development of low and high temperature electrolysers; - analysis of degradation phenomena at various scales (nano-scale in functional layers up to systems level), including the development of accelerated testing procedures; - socio-economic and cross-cutting issues: public health, public acceptance, economics, market introduction; system studies on the benefits of FCH technologies to national and international energy supply. The training programme can build on the vast investments made by the participating universities in the past and facilitated by EPSRC, EU, industry and private funds. The laboratory infrastructure is up to date and fully enables the work of the student cohort. Industry funding is used to complement the EPSRC funding and add studentships on top of the envisaged 52 placements. The Centre will emphasise the importance of networking and exchange of information across the scientific and engineering field and thus interacts strongly with the EPSRC-SUPERGEN Hub in Fuel Cells and Hydrogen, thus integrating the other UK universities active in this research area, and also encourage exchanges with other European and international training initiatives. The modules will be accessible to professionals from the interacting industry in order to foster exchange of students with their peers in industry.

The motivation for this proposal is that the global reliance on fossil fuels is set to increase with the rapid growth of Asian economies and major discoveries of shale gas in developed nations. The strategic vision of the IDC is to develop a world-leading Centre for Industrial Doctoral Training focussed on delivering research leaders and next-generation innovators with broad economic, societal and contextual awareness, having strong technical skills and capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles. They will be able to analyse the overall economic context of projects and be aware of their social and ethical implications. These skills will enable them to contribute to stimulating UK-based industry to develop next-generation technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and ultimately improve the UK's position globally through increased jobs and exports. The Centre will involve over 50 recognised academics in carbon capture & storage (CCS) and cleaner fossil energy to provide comprehensive supervisory capacity across the theme for 70 doctoral students. It will provide an innovative training programme co-created in collaboration with our industrial partners to meet their advanced skills needs. The industrial letters of support demonstrate a strong need for the proposed Centre in terms of research to be conducted and PhDs that will be produced, with 10 new companies willing to join the proposed Centre including EDF Energy, Siemens, BOC Linde and Caterpillar, together with software companies, such as ANSYS, involved with power plant and CCS simulation. We maintain strong support from our current partners that include Doosan Babcock, Alstom Power, Air Products, the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Tata Steel, SSE, RWE npower, Johnson Matthey, E.ON, CPL Industries, Clean Coal Ltd and Innospec, together with the Biomass & Fossil Fuels Research Alliance (BF2RA), a grouping of companies across the power sector. Further, we have engaged SMEs, including CMCL Innovation, 2Co Energy, PSE and C-Capture, that have recently received Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)/Technology Strategy Board (TSB)/ETI/EC support for CCS projects. The active involvement companies have in the research projects, make an IDC the most effective form of CDT to directly contribute to the UK maintaining a strong R&D base across the fossil energy power and allied sectors and to meet the aims of the DECC CCS Roadmap in enabling industry to define projects fitting their R&D priorities. The major technical challenges over the next 10-20 years identified by our industrial partners are: (i) implementing new, more flexible and efficient fossil fuel power plant to meet peak demand as recognised by electricity market reform incentives in the Energy Bill, with efficiency improvements involving materials challenges and maximising biomass use in coal-fired plant; (ii) deploying CCS at commercial scale for near-zero emission power plant and developing cost reduction technologies which involves improving first-generation solvent-based capture processes, developing next-generation capture processes, and understanding the impact of impurities on CO2 transport and storage; (iimaximising the potential of unconventional gas, including shale gas, 'tight' gas and syngas produced from underground coal gasification; and (iii) developing technologies for vastly reduced CO2 emissions in other industrial sectors: iron and steel making, cement, refineries, domestic fuels and small-scale diesel power generatort and These challenges match closely those defined in EPSRC's Priority Area of 'CCS and cleaner fossil energy'. Further, they cover biomass firing in conventional plant defined in the Bioenergy Priority Area, where specific issues concern erosion, corrosion, slagging, fouling and overall supply chain economics.

By 2050 it's estimated >400 GW of energy will be gathered by offshore wind across the whole North Sea. For scale, Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor is projected to produce 3.2 GW. How will this increased anthropogenic use of our coastal seas impact already stressed marine ecosystems? And how will that same production of renewable energy offset risks of extreme climate change that, left unchecked, will increase the risk of biodiversity declines. There are many complex changes to ecosystems linked to Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) that we need to understand now, so that the extent of increasing wind energy extraction further offshore is managed in the most sustainable way. An important effect of large wind energy extraction will be to reduce the amount of energy that would normally go into local ocean currents via surface stress, altering sea state and mixing. Conversely, there will be local increases in turbulence around turbine structures and seabed scouring near fixed foundations. Any change in ocean mixing may change the timing, distribution and diversity of phytoplankton primary production, the base of the food chain for marine ecosystems, to some degree. This has knock-on-effects on the diversity, health and locations of pelagic fish that are critical prey species of commercial fish, seabirds and marine mammals. Observed changes caused by operational OWFs in the southern North Sea include local surface temperature rise and the displacement of seabirds and fishing fleets from the OWF footprint, whereas seals often appear to be feeding near turbines. All of these changes have a linked component - important prey fish species - which are likely to aggregate near structures (as seen at other offshore platforms). Seabirds and fishing fleets subsequently have less space to hunt, with potentially increased competition for fish. However, if OWFs are also de facto marine protected areas and so positively affect local primary production, they may provide good habitat for fish population growth. So, what are the cumulative effects of current OWF developments and the thousands of additional planned structures? Do the physical, biogeochemical and ecosystem changes exacerbate or mitigate those resulting from climate change? As OWFs migrate further offshore as floating structures, how can current knowledge based on shallow, coastal fixed turbines be suitably extrapolated to understand the impacts on ecosystems dependent on seasonal cycles that are typical of deeper waters? PELAgIO will address all of these questions through an interdisciplinary, multi-scale observation and modelling framework that spans physical mixing through to plankton production, on to the response of fish and whole ecosystems. We will collect fine-scale data using the latest multi-instrumented acoustic platforms set beside and away from OWFs, complemented by autonomous surface and submarine robots to capture continuous and coincident data from physics to fish, over multiple scales and seasons to fully understand what is 'different' inside an OWF and how big its footprint is. These new data will test the effects on seabirds and marine mammals to build an OWF ecosystem parameterization that accounts for changes to mixing and wind deficit impacts, and is scalable to next-generation OWFs. This bottom-up, comprehensive approach will enable true calibration and validation of 3D ocean-biogeochemical-sediment modelling systems, from the scale of turbine foundations up to the regional and even cross-shelf scales. Identified changes will be integrated into Bayesian ecosystem models that enable the cumulative effects of ecological, social and economic trade-offs of different policy approaches for OWFs to be quantifiably assessed for present day conditions, during extreme events and under climate change.

The project will provide strategic insights regarding the integration of the transport sector into future low carbon electricity grids, and is inspired by limitations in current grid investment, operation and control practices as well as regulation and market operation, which may prevent an economically and environmentally effective transition to electric mobility. Although various individual aspects of the operation of electricity systems within an integrated transport sector have received some research attention, integrated planning of the grid, EV charging infrastructure and ICT (information and communication technologies) infrastructure design have not been addressed yet. In this proposal we propose to tackle these challenges in an integrated manner. At the heart of our proposal is a whole systems approach. It recognises the need to consider: EV demand and flexibility, electricity network operation and design, charging infrastructure operation and investment, ICT requirements and business models for electric mobility. This is essential when considering constraints imposed by the network on EV charging, and in return the requirements imposed by EVs on the system design and operation. This research will place emphasis on future energy scenarios relevant to the UK and China, but the tools, methods and technologies we develop will have wider applications. Specifically, a number of infrastructure planning related challenges for the massive rollout of EV have yet to be comprehensively investigated. First, traditional models of the travel of vehicles are based on the statistical prediction of aggregate-level travel demand without capturing the behavioural characterisation of users' driving requirements and preferences. Hence, this project will investigate new alternative activity-based travel demand models capturing in a bottom-up approach the behavioural basis of individual users' decisions regarding participation in activities yielding driving needs, behavioural aspects related to EV adoption and alternative EV charging strategies, as well as the characteristics of EV and the charging infrastructure. Unlike the existing models that analyse the EV impacts on isolated sectors of the power system, this project will assess economic effects on generation, transmission and distribution sectors simultaneously and subsequently reveal trade-offs between the cost and benefit streams of different EV charging strategies for different actors in the electricity chain. Furthermore, the closely related problem of EV charging infrastructure and ICT infrastructure planning -which has a central role in the massive EV rollout- has been almost completely neglected. This research project will examine novel risk-constrained stochastic optimization approaches in order to address the challenge of strategically investing in EV recharging and ICT infrastructures ahead of need, and will analytically investigate the interdependence between the power systems and EV enabling infrastructure planning. This project will also investigate alternative business models for the EV market integration and will propose a framework providing the opportunity for EVs to simultaneously support more efficient system operation and investment in assets across the entire electricity system chain. This research will formulate a new decentralised, market-based planning mechanism appropriate for deregulated power system environment and enable the investigation of the impact of alternative market designs and arrangements on the cost effectiveness of EV integration. Finally, a set of comprehensive use cases employing tools and methodologies developed in the project will be employed to understand the role and the importance of electric mobility in future UK and China low carbon systems and produce a suitable commercial and regulatory framework and a set of policy recommendations on ways of supporting the optimal deployment of EV infrastructure.

Electricity transmission and distribution companies in the UK face serious challenges in continuing to provide high reliability from ageing networks. This is made more difficult by increasing economic and environmental pressures. The problems will become worse as the operating conditions of the networks are changed, to allow for the production of more electricity from renewable sources.To meet this challenge, network owners and operators need better knowledge of plant ageing and improved techniques to monitor its condition.As power is generated in different locations, so the pattern of current flow through the network changes. This alters the temperature of plant items (like transformers, overhead lines and underground cables), which make up the network. Other changes in operating conditions, such as when switches are operated, will affect the stresses seen by plant. We will investigate the effect of the new operating demands on individual items of plant in order to predict their effect on the reliability of the network.We will also investigate some innovative techniques for monitoring plant condition. These will range from techniques which give a general indication of the health of an entire substation, down to those which give detailed information on a specific item of plant. The work will look at new sensors, data capture, data management and data interpretation. Network owners and operators also need improved methods of protecting and controlling the network. New software tools will help them plan replacements as parts of the network wear out. Our work will help get the most power through the ageing network and allow owners to invest in new or replacement plant in a cost-effective way. All this has to be done while maintaining or improving the security of supply and taking into account interactions between gas and electricity networks. Software tools will be developed to calculate the optimum size and location of new generating plant and to calculate the cost that should be charged to transport electricity from a particular location.Finally, research into electrical plant with reduced environmental impact will allow the use of environmentally friendly replacements. There are three main aspects to this work: exploring methods of reducing the use of SF6 (a greenhouse gas), examining techniques for transmitting more power down existing lines and investigating methods of reducing environmental impacts (for example, oil leaks) from underground cable.EPSRC has assembled a team of six universities, which have the skills needed to tackle these challenges. These universities have worked closely with major electric utilities and equipment manufacturers to prepare this proposal. The industrial partners will provide a valuable contribution, both through funding and also by supplying their technical expertise and guidance.Our work will benefit electricity utilities, which will spend less on maintenance and get more for their money when buying new plant. Consumers will gain through improved reliability of their electricity supply. UK manufacturers will be able to exploit the new condition monitoring and diagnostic techniques. Society in general will benefit through reductions in environmental impact.