Rural Energy Hubs Project

The Rural Energy Hubs project builds upon decades of experience, joint working and delivering innovative low-carbon projects in Orkney and Shetland. It embraces a place-based demonstration approach to overcoming non-technical barriers to accelerate decarbonisation. Seven work packages integrated across the energy system to demonstrate how decarbonisation can be developed, embedded and accelerated by establishing locally-led coordinated action in Rural Energy Hubs, providing innovative and practical focal-points to drive decarbonisation for individuals, businesses and local authorities, maximising social, economic and environmental benefits.

This project brings together work and partners from the Net Zero Living Orkney and Shetland Rural Energy Hubs projects in Phase 1 of the Net Zero Living: Pathfinder Places programme. Both studies built on learning and challenges from the IUK PFER demonstration project ReFLEX Orkney, an ambitious programme of innovative integrated consumer-facing community-led services that encountered significant non-technical barriers.

This Phase 2 project seeks innovative solutions to key non-technical barriers: finance, regulation, grid capacity, resource, behavioural change and lack of data. High-impact outputs have been developed to encompass all modalities of the energy system:

* Transport -- innovative electric solutions for local authority fleets including large mobility vehicles, integrating demand-led community-managed services, a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platform and distributed charging infrastructure, financially sustainable car club models for rural areas, maritime (electric) and aviation (hydrogen) decarbonisation trials for passenger vessel and heavy-lift drones, plus holistic, system-wide planning for decarbonisation of transport across communities.

* Heat -- district heating solutions for rural communities, smarter monitoring in domestic and community premises to drive behaviour change, development of the Building Renovation Passport programme to support users through all aspects of decarbonising homes and offices.

* Power -- developing affordable models of supporting individuals, communities and businesses with renewable generation and battery solutions; including incorporating energy generation and storage into Rural Energy Hubs.

These mode-based innovation activities will be linked together to allow the setup of the first pilot Rural Energy Hub, in Brae, Shetland; showcasing delivery of our fully integrated, local, placed-based solutions.

Learning will be combined into a UK-wide replication plan, which incorporates a range of place-based business models to ensure maximum uptake.

The partners are Aquatera (AQT) (lead), Orkney Islands Council (OIC), Shetland Islands Council (SIC), the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), and Community Energy Scotland (CES). This hand-picked team brings together significant real-world experience of addressing non-technical barriers to decarbonisation and successfully delivering ambitious projects of this nature.