Achieving the decarbonisation of the economy while maintaining the security and reliability of the energy supply will require a profound transformation of the networks used to transport energy into and within the country. The creation of a hub will catalyse and focus the research on energy networks in the UK, aiming to publish of in-depth position papers and the organisation of workshops and other mechanisms for the exchange of ideas between researchers and between researchers, industry and the public sector. The project partners are Imperial College (lead) and the Universities of Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester, Nottingham, Southampton, Strathclyde and Warwick. University of Bristol hosted the HubNet SmartGrid Symposium in Septeber 2012.

The activities of the members of the hub focus in five different areas of power networks; the Bristol team focuses specifically on the research challenges and solutions in the design and performance evaluation of ICT plane solutions for the Smart Grid - in particular the application of communication technologies to the operation of electricity networks and the harnessing of the demand-side for the control and optimisation of the power system. To this extent the Bristol team has developed CLEVERsim 1, a discrete-event distributed system simulator package for smart energy system modelling and performance evaluation.

[1] Song, Kaleshi et al. “Performance evaluation of integrated smart energy solutions through large-scale simulations.” in IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm), 2011.p. 37 - 42.