The UK’s electricity, gas, and heating networks currently operate largely in isolation, but a new framework aims to model them as a single, flexible system—and then figure out how to make money from storing energy across all of them. This matters because the UK has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, and renewable energy sources like wind and solar are intermittent. Energy storage can smooth out their output, but no one has yet built a practical business case for deploying storage at scale. The problem is tangled: current regulations, market rules, and investment models don’t account for the multiple services a single battery or heat store can provide—steady power, grid balancing, voltage support—across different energy vectors and time horizons. If the MY-STORE framework succeeds, it will give policymakers and investors a clear, quantified picture of how any storage technology—from household batteries to power-to-gas plants—can generate revenue and reduce system costs. That could unlock private investment, accelerate the rollout of storage, and make the UK’s energy grid more reliable and cheaper to run as it decarbonises. The project focuses on the UK but is designed to be transferable to other countries.
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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.
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