Cenex, the UK's first Centre of Excellence for low carbon technologies, has joined a consortium selected by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) to deliver a consumers, vehicles and energy integration project.
The consortium, led by the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), will be responsible for developing and running the consumer and fleet vehicle trials. Cenex will be supporting the design and hosting one of the trial sites.
The ETI will invest up to £5 million in the two-year project which aims to understand how the UK energy system needs to adapt in order to accommodate and encourage greater adoption of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles. The two-year project will be carried out in two stages.
The first stage will focus on detailed analysis and design of market, policy and regulatory frameworks, business models and customer offerings, electricity and liquid fuel infrastructure, and technologies throughout the energy system. This will be supported by insights from consumers and fleets into the use of plug-in vehicles.
The second stage will involve Cenex managing a trial of mass market users to validate the impact of solutions identified in stage one and so understand consumer and fleet responses to the vehicles as well as managed charging schemes.
Robert Evans, CEO of Cenex, said: 'We are delighted to be working as partners and alongside industry leaders in this TRL-led project.
'We hope that it will help us to understand how regular UK residents will use Plug-in Hybrid and Electric Vehicles in real world situations, how they will charge them and what effect this will have on the energy system.
'Cenex has built up an incredible knowledge over the last ten years through trials of over 1,000 low carbon vehicles and we are excited to be using our world leading low carbon vehicle monitoring tool to run the consumer vehicle trials.'
