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ENERGY PROJECTS I ts been a year since the government launched the programme, with the aim of stimulating and proving the best innovative, investable and intel - ligent local energy system approaches that can provide cheaper, cleaner energy. With a £102 million budget from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, we in UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) have had a very busy year making those plans a reality. This article aims to update on that progress, give insight into the projects that have been funded and explore how the public and private sector will continue to collaborate to achieve the ambitious goals of the programme. An article in this publication last July laid out our objectives, but they are worth repeating a year on. We aim to prove novel, investable and scalable local energy busi - ness models that can provide the cleaner, cheaper energy of the future, and delivered for users in ways they want. To scale these approaches and capture the associated societal benefits we want to unlock 10 times more private investment NETWORK / 36 / MAY 2019 in integrated local energy systems in the 2020s, bring growth to economies across the UK via high value job creation associated with new local energy systems and growing businesses able to deliver new products and services in real-world proving grounds and build exportable UK leadership in inte - grated energy provision. In practical terms, we aim to do this by funding ground-breaking local energy sys- tem demonstrators; developing a pipeline of ambitious, investable local energy designs; funding critical innovations in the system; and bringing together new multidiscipli - nary research in local energy systems. All this will be drawn together by the Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) which will add best practice expertise and modelling across the programme and draw out critical insights for industry, government and regulators. To achieve these goals, local areas will need to work with a broad consortium of partners, which together can build an investment-ready business model under which numerous assets on the supply and demand side can be intelligently integrated to deliver power, heat and mobility more effectively. It is a very complex system to put together and that's why public money is needed to set a step-change level of ambi - tion, share some of the risk and facilitate the convening of such stakeholder groups across the value-chain. The programme is at a very exciting stage. In early April we unveiled four game changing local energy demonstrators, which will be developed and built in the next three years to illustrate how integrated intelligent local systems can deliver power, heat and mobility to users in new and better ways. We have kicked off 11 concept designs of future energy systems, targeting areas across the country with rural, urban, do - mestic, industrial, commercial and mixed energy systems. A second call for detailed designs projects will be run shortly. We have also just completed a portfolio of early innovation projects developing new storage, PV and AI platform developments amongst others. Furthermore, a new research consortium (EnergyREV) led by Strathclyde University has been initiated to develop new inter- disciplinary insights from the research base about local energy systems that can be used by industry and government. And last, but very much not least, we have contracted the Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) to work with all the projects under its Energy Revolution Integration Service (ERIS) to ensure all projects have the best possible expertise fed into them, and that insights are generated from across the programme that can be used by industry, government and regulators alike to better plan for making the most of the energy revolution. Programme outputs The demonstrators perhaps provide the most immediate outputs from the pro- gramme, aiming to prove over the next three years how these local intelligent systems can deliver widespread benefits. A deeper look into these projects reveals the ambition and vision of the consortia who have pulled them together. Firstly, two major projects in and around Oxford are combining to create a 'super-demonstrator' proving very differ - ent approaches to the challenge. Local Energy Oxfordshire (LEO), led by SSEN and working with a wide-ranging consortium including local authorities, local NGOs, universities and a number of market opera- tors are building on an intelligence upgrade to the local network there to prove that the 'district system operator' model can deliver right across the value chain that includes the consumer. A local energy market will Demonstrating energy Rob Saunders - challenge director, UK Research & Innovation at Innovate UK - updates Network readers on the progress of the government's 'Prospering from the Energy Revolution' programme.