Energy System Digital Twin

To decarbonise the energy system by the year 2050, it is crucial that decision-makers are equipped with the insights they need to ensure their decisions are effective and influential.

The challenge of providing relevant and timely information is compounded by the increasing decentralisation of the energy system, with more assets interacting with it now than ever.

The Energy System Digital Twin Demonstrator Project was commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to create a demonstrator to show how policymakers might augment decision making with an interactive model of the energy system that visualised the impact of various policy decisions.

Gageware supported Cityscape Digital in its collaboration with the Energy Systems Catapult and the Alan Turing Institute to create a technical demonstrator using low-code visualisation tools to rapidly develop and iterate an online, interactive user interface over the Catapult’s core modelling capabilities.

We sketched out the required user journeys with the catapult team, explored the data structures of the various models that needed to be visualised and rapidly created a prototype to validate enabling everyone's conceptual expectations with a tangible output. From there we iterated the visual layout and sequencing, underlying data structure and calculations until the requirements were fulfilled and testing accepted.

The Technical Demonstrator has helped the Energy Systems Catapult set a blueprint for how they amalgamate different data sources into a single, interactive online model that can be shared in different ways with different user types. It has also helped bring together and connect other energy system actors to enable further collaborations to be explored with the objective of helping the UK reach net zero carbon.

Read more on the Energy Systems Catapult's website here.