Artificial intelligence seen as a key technology to enable better balancing of UK's energy market

Upside Energy and Heriot-Watt University have been awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) grant by Innovate UK to maximise the opportunities presented by the emerging energy demand response market. The project will use machine learning, and distributed artificial intelligence methods to manage a portfolio of storage assets to provide real-time energy reserves to the grid. Upside Energy's Virtual Energy Store aims to relieve stress on the grid by managing a number of distributed storage resources, thereby reducing the UK's reliance on the spinning reserve capacity provided by traditional power stations. Upside has developed an Advanced Algorithmic Platform (AAP) which allows a substantial ensemble of algorithms that manage demand response of different devices to be run in parallel. Upside will work with Heriot-Watt University to optimise their existing selection of control algorithms and how they are utilised in different scenarios using the University's specialist skills in machine learning, artificial intelligence and stochastic optimisation.