Meadows WiseGrid Model at City as Lab

In the past Mozes and Nottingham Energy Partnership worked on a PV and battery installation project in the Meadows. Since then we have been working on a way of sharing energy that we generate in the Meadows with each other, rather than sending it out onto the grid. The advantage of this is that people who generate energy will be able to be paid more for the energy they produce and those who buy the shared energy will be able to purchase it much cheaper as grid system charges would be avoided.

This is not yet legal but the government is making strong moves towards supporting Community Energy: keeping energy local will mean less cost in upgrading the main grid which can be reserved for the energy generated by the big wind farms in the North Sea and Scotland. The local system would be entirely digital and wouldn’t need any changes to the local grid wiring.

Mozes has been working with Nottingham University, SmartKlub and Nottingham Energy Partnership on the project with a grant from the Community Energy Fund and are going to take the project down to Parliament to present to MP’s in September.

To do this we have hooked up with City as Lab who are now located in the Central Library. City as Lab is a scale model of the City of Nottingham onto which different data sets can be projected to various aspects of the makeup of the city and what might happen in the future.

Because we have been doing a lot of work with them they have also made a special Meadows Model. We are using this model to demonstrate how an energy sharing community would work in the Meadows as we increase the amount of generation and battery storage, alongside heat pumps and electric cars and how this would help us achieve lower energy prices and lower our carbon footprint.

Both the Meadows model and a larger model of the City are in Room 1 at the Central Library for the summer – so if you are in town when it is open, it is worth a look.