Energy Systems Nexus: Academic Challenge Areas

The Energy Systems Nexus brings together the most progressive and impactful industry players with some of the world’s brightest minds in energy systems. Collaboratively defining and delivering a whole energy systems-based R&D programme that will enable industry to realise the massive opportunities in Net Zero. Our members span the energy sector, seeking to identify common challenges and shaping opportunities that exist through collaboration.

The Nexus includes a systematic process to identify these whole-system challenges, which we call the Structured Innovation Process. Through this, we elicit industry-backed ideas. Some of these are perfect to be delivered within the Nexus itself. Some of these ideas are better suited to academic challenge areas, and we therefore write them up as short proposals that can be requested by academics to bid into third-party funding.

On this Portal, you will see the top-line summary of the proposed challenge area, together with a summary of considered potential approaches, anticipated objectives and outcomes which have been identified as valuable. These approaches are recommendations only and we would welcome alternative and innovative approaches to addressing the challenge areas.

You are welcome to request access to a challenge area if you have the intention to seek funding from a third-party source, e.g. for PhD students as part of a Doctorate Training Centre, or post-doctoral research on a UKRI grant-funded programme.

There is no commitment from our members to financially support these challenges but, on a case-by-case basis, those members (including the Catapult) who have identified the challenge area may agree to provide a level of industrial support (in-kind or direct) for your application. This will be facilitated by the Catapult.

Our aim is to support research excellence, supporting ambitious academics to apply their expertise and passion to challenge areas that have a clear route to impact and application for some of the UK’s energy systems challenges.

If you are successful in funding, Energy Systems Catapult, in our role delivering the Energy Systems Nexus, will support you to ensure that your project gets the best exposure to wider industry and beyond.

See our current three challenge calls below:

Challenge one: Representing extended time horizons in innovation prioritisation and industrial strategy

Overview:

For nearly 20 years, the UK energy system strategy has been focused on 2050. As we approach this horizon, we face critical questions on how to structure our energy system now to support long-term prosperity in the second half of this century.

Our members are interested in exploring the impact of extending whole energy system modelling time horizons beyond 2050 to better capture the long-term benefits of medium-term decisions and emerging technologies.

These include, but are not limited to, the evolving distribution of industrial centres in relation to low-carbon resources and the justification or otherwise of nuclear deployments, data centres and large-scale heat networks.

Background and rationale:

The UK’s current energy system has been shaped by geopolitics, international trade and the availability of resources. These resources and relationships are changing, and one might expect the long-term energy system characteristics to evolve accordingly. 2050 is a key policy driver, but for our members, their long-term prosperity doesn’t stop at 2050. Therefore, research into how the UK industrial landscape could be reconfigured this century to deliver ever more optimised collocation of processes is valuable. How might the emergence of centres of recoverable heat and abundant electricity define where you choose to locate energy demands such as data-centres, DACCS, alternative liquid fuel production and more? Is it necessarily the case that we want to deploy these around existing industrial clusters, or are there other drivers?

Looking out into 2060 or 2070 might enable us to balance a short term focus with longer term optimal solutions for infrastructure that will last well into the second half of this century, such as industrial clusters, city heat networks etc. Extending the time horizon might also offer a fresh take on more immature, potentially disruptive technologies that may support societal objectives in new, disruptive ways. These could include large-scale generation like nuclear AMRs, space-based solar, and fusion, as well as specific technologies in demand sectors. It creates a sandpit where the impacts of these earlier TRL technologies might be more fully understood.

Objectives:

Primary aim of the research: Explore the impacts of extending UK whole energy system modelling time horizons to 2060 or 2070 on decisions being made in the medium term (i.e. next 10-15 years).

Specific goals or questions to be addressed:

  • What is the respective impact of longer time horizons on the scale, location and type of energy assets such as nuclear, data centres and industrial clusters?

  • What are the innovations that might become more optimal energy system options in the second half of the century than those that would deliver Net Zero by 2050?

Proposed methodology:

We would envisage this to be primarily a quantitative assessment using whole energy-system modelling. For the right candidate with the appropriate expertise in optimisation modelling, the Catapult would consider providing our national ESME model to the researcher.  

Expected outcomes:

  • Understanding of how extending planning and investment time horizons may impact upon the optimal energy system design;

  • Understanding of the potential scale of disruption by lower TRL, high potential technologies such as space-based solar and fusion;

  • Understanding of how these energy system uncertainties and opportunities might influence medium-term decisions on key sectors such as data centres, nuclear power and industrial clusters. 

Stakeholders:

Upon enquiry, we will confirm which Nexus members would be open to supporting this project. Please use the button below to start your enquiry.

Challenge two: Quantifying demand flexibility in non-domestic buildings to support secondary impacts on the public sector

Overview:

Flexibility has the potential to unlock new business models for consumers. Our members are interested in how both retail and deep-tech propositions could unlock flexibility in non-domestic buildings that can, in turn, support secondary impacts outside of the energy sector. Specifically, this proposed project area would explore how this could be applied to NHS trust buildings and feed societal value back to the UK public through reduced NHS operational costs. This work could have access to safeguarded data stored within the Smart Energy Data Service (SENSE) platform, including UK-wide DNO capacity data and energy consumption profiles for hospital sites.

Background and rationale:

Consumer-led flexibility is critical to decarbonising the energy system. In the domestic sector, there has been substantial research carried out on the benefits of passing the value of flexibility to domestic consumers, lowering bills and allowing multiplier effects through the economy.

However, our members see value in supporting non-domestic public sector estates to unlock new social value propositions whilst unlocking additional network capacity. The healthcare sector has both complex energy requirements and stakeholder needs while offering potentially significant energy system value that could be fed directly back into reducing healthcare costs.

Two mechanisms to do so could be through the use of deep-tech such as AI or machine learning and/or novel retail propositions.

This research will be to use a combination of advanced data techniques and consumer research to understand the potential impacts of flexibility within the NHS estate.

Objectives:

Primary aim of the research: Understand the potential for flexibility within NHS sites to release network capacity and pass through value to the public.

Specific goals or questions to be addressed:

  • Assess the potential for flexibility from NHS Trust Sites;

  • How can novel retail propositions and/or deep-tech technologies be applied to unlock flexibility from NHS Trust Sites?

  • How much value can be passed back to NHS Trusts and what impact could that have on healthcare?

Proposed methodology:

This work could have access to safeguarded data stored within the Smart Energy Data Service (SENSE) platform, including:

  • Data are for hospitals within 25 NHS trusts which have given consent for their energy consumption data to be shared for research purposes. The data are provided at the finest granularity available - with half hourly data available in a number of cases.

  • Merged Distribution Network Operator (DNO) source dataset consolidates essential data sourced from various DNOs into a single comprehensive dataset providing a consistent summary of commonly required information, such as voltage, capacity and substation ID.

We would expect some combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to assessing the potential for flexibility, building on available data to support and validate analysis. The quantitative data would include assessments of flexibility potential, while the qualitative approaches would identify the value realisation routes for the NHS Trust sites.

Expected outcomes:

The outcomes that our members would value include:

  • Demonstrating the potential to ensure that consumers (in this case NHS Sites) engage with and benefit from the NHS transition;

  • Quantifying the ongoing grid capacity that could be unlocked from NHS Sites;

  • Demonstrate potential for reliable flexibility from NHS sites, and the extent to which this could/should offset the need for alternative investment into flexible assets elsewhere in the system;

  • Understanding the impact of flexibility value pass through on potential health outcomes.

Stakeholders:

Upon enquiry, we will confirm which Nexus members would be open to supporting this project. Other stakeholders would include network operators and NHS stakeholders – the Catapult, through the Nexus, would look to support your engagement with these stakeholders. Please use the button below to start your enquiry.

Challenge three: Evidencing the distributional impacts of the energy transition on low-income and fuel-poor households

Overview:

This proposed work seeks to quantify how rising non-commodity electricity costs fall disproportionately on different income groups and geographies. We believe that an assessment of strategic interventions to mitigate disproportionate impacts is needed, including through changes in retail, energy supply cost recovery and AI-based operational innovations.

Our members are all committed to supporting a fair transition and their support could be supplemented by data available to researchers through the Smart Energy Data Service (SENSE) platform such as UK spend insights derived from Barclays transactions, Fuel Poverty Statistics England 2025 and Sub-Regional Fuel Poverty Data.

Background and rationale:

There is a current lack of data-driven, well-informed analysis of how new electricity loads affect residential bills.

Our members are all invested in delivering a future system that provides consumers with access to affordable energy and valuable outcomes, from warmth and mobility to health and entertainment.

Non-commodity costs on energy bills are a topic in the current discourse, but there has been less research into how the evolving nature of the energy system will impact the distribution of non-commodity costs, and the resulting socio-economic impacts.

Objectives:

Primary aim of the research: Identify the potential impacts of the evolving energy system on non-commodity energy cost distributions and options through which different stakeholders throughout the sector can support the mitigation of evolving inequality.

Specific goals or questions to be addressed:

  • What is the current state of distribution impacts of non-commodity costs?

  • How may this distribution be impacted by evolutions in the future energy system?

  • Are there interventions that industry can make to reduce and/or mitigate the impacts of any distributional inequalities in non-commodity costs?

Proposed methodology:

We would anticipate that this would be a mixed method approach combining deep data analytics with potentially incomplete datasets with socio-economic qualitative research.

Using data within the Smart Energy Data Service can provide a powerful socioeconomic evidence base that researchers can use to support this question, including:

  • Fuel Poverty Statistics England 2025;

  • Sub-Regional Fuel Poverty Data;

  • UK spend insights derived from Barclays transactions,;

  • Council Tax Statistics;

  • UK House Price Index.

Expected outcomes:

  • Inform policy on how costs of the transition are allocated across society, including the electrification of heat.

  • Identify non-policy approaches that industry can take to support fair allocation of costs or else mitigate impacts of them.

Stakeholders:

Upon enquiry, we will confirm which Nexus members would be open to supporting this project. Please use the button below to start your enquiry.