The UK has set out ambitious net-zero emissions targets, in line with the agreements made at COP21 including the submission of a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) every 5 years from 2020. In order to achieve these targets, strategies across numerous sectors have been produced and further developed over the years to adapt to unprecedented challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and energy crisis. A significant focus of these strategies has been the integration of hydrogen as a key energy vector in UK’s energy transition towards net-zero emissions. Acknowledging the potential role of hydrogen in decarbonising many sectors from industry to transport means recognising that this hydrogen needs to be produced through low-carbon routes. A whole system understanding, covering the breadth of UK energy sectors and the implication of the developing hydrogen economy, is necessary to evaluate the feasibility UK’s net-zero strategies and predicted pathways.
Ensuring an equitable transition has been recognised as a key part of policy, especially in the height of fuel poverty exacerbated by high energy prices. Consumers in the UK who are vulnerable to fuel poverty within demand sectors, like transport and buildings, may be unequally affected by certain decarbonisation policy mechanisms. Certain mechanisms regulating the phase out of certain technologies could cause more vulnerable consumers incurring a greater cost in proportion to their income. This emphasises the need for energy modelling through the lens of autonomous agents that represent stakeholders throughout the diverse parts of the energy supply chain. Often energy models encounter challenges in their ability to represent human behaviour and subsequent impacts in light of different scenarios. Agent-based modelling (ABM), a type of IAM, can solve this by capturing the complexities of individuals or groups as they interact within a system.
MUSE (ModUlar energy systems Simulation Environment) is a novel, open-source, ABM framework used to model the behaviours of different energy stakeholders and their investment decisions. MUSE is able to provide insights on capacity building of different technologies, commodity consumption and prices as well as CO2 emissions data subject to the implementation of a carbon budget. Therefore, this framework can overcome the current energy modelling limitations due its spatial, temporal and technological flexibility and ability to characterise, amongst a diverse choice of rules and objectives, sector-specific agents with limited foresight to capture the intricacies of real-world decision-making.
By utilising MUSE, this project models the UK’s whole energy system up to 2050, including hydrogen integration, describing different sectors as modules containing an array of technology choices in which agents can invest in according to demand and their decision-making behaviour. This UK MUSE model covers the supply, conversion and demand sectors across the UK’s energy system, each of which are split into further sub-sectors containing data governing technology characteristics and agent characterisation where applicable. Agents have been characterised within the transport and buildings demand sectors by identifying and segregating household groups in terms of consumer behaviour in each sector, accounting for factors such as income and technology affordability, household type and transport habits.
By focussing on demand sectors, this model will aim to answer questions related to the impact, if any, that hydrogen will have not only for feasible net-zero national pathways, but also distributional impacts of decarbonisation within these sectors. Uptake of hydrogen technologies, from conversion to demand sectors, and how this is affected by the implementation of certain policy mechanisms will be studied by the model to understand the potential of a hydrogen economy as a strategy within the UK’s decarbonisation pathways. Additionally, through scenario analysis an assessment of the feasibility of hydrogen uptake alongside other technology developments, such as electrification in demand sectors, can be made and compared alongside current UK strategy roadmaps. By representing the UK’s household consumers as different grouped agents with certain sets of priorities and budgets, this MUSE UK model will enable an evaluation of how policies, regulations and technology developments can impact adoption trends, specifically due to the integration of newer hydrogen processes. Additionally, the model results will provide insight on costs borne by consumers and any resulting disparities across groups of agents while aligning with national net-zero emission targets. These findings will have the potential to identify which groups of consumers are in need of greater financial or regulatory support from the government.
Overall, these findings will aim to assess the effectiveness of current roadmaps and provide recommendations for socially equitable and feasible strategies to achieve UK’s 2050 net-zero goals. This research aims to advance current knowledge by providing a more behaviourally informed assessment of the UK’s decarbonisation pathways, while maintaining a whole energy system representation.