News

CLNR project dissemination event held at Durham

(20 August 2012)

As part of the Customer Led Network Revolution (CLNR) project, a smart grid dissemination event, attended by almost all electrical transmission and distribution companies across the Uk was recently held at the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Durham.  The CLNR project, funded by the UK energy regulator (Ofgem), is the UK's largest smart grid project and one of the largest such programmes in the world.  The project is a collaboration between Northern Powergrid, British Gas, EA Technology and Durham University.  The Durham University team consists of a cross-disciplinary group from the Departments of Geography, Anthropology, and the School of Engineering & Computing Sciences (ECS) and is led by Professor Philip Taylor.  The key objective of the programme is to understand how customer and network flexibility can be used to facilitate deployment of low carbon technologies and enable decarbonisation of the UK energy portfolio.  A video explaining the project in greater depth can be accessed here.

As part of the dissemination event, a tour of ECS state-of-the-art Smart Grid Laboratory was included.  The laboratory cotnains a low-voltage experimental network, to which various low-carbon technologies such as a solar PV emulator, wind turbine emulator, heat pump and electric vehicle charger are connected.  The real network can be linked to larger and more complex computer based models using a Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS).  This facility, in tandem with conventional computer based power system modelling, is used to acheive the specific research objectives of this project and is also available to any member of ECS to investigate power system phenomena as part of their research.

More information on the Smart Grid Laboratory is available via the link.