Smart gas grid control to increase biomethane injection capacity

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To move to a more sustainable energy mix and decarbonise heat an increasing proportion of gas used in homes will need to come from renewable sources. A major contribution could come from AD (anaerobic digestion) plants that produce bio-methane from waste and inject directly into the gas network. However, these plants need to be connected into the lower tiers of the network. At times of low demand, the networks can have insufficient injection capacity to take all the gas that could be produced. This leads to AD plants reducing output or having to flare surplus gas. Furthermore, applications to connect new AD plants can be turned down due to a lack of injection capacity on that part of the network. A solution to this problem is to use the network as storage increasing the pressure at times of surplus production to store excess biomethane and dropping the pressure when demand once more exceeds production of biomethane. However, this requires a retrofitable smart control solution because the governors feeding the networks are currently all manually adjusted. Utonomy has already developed an innovative retrofitable pressure management solution to control LP (low pressure) networks. This new project aims to modify the actuator design and develop the software to control the MP (medium pressure) networks to which AD plants are connected. Trials will be carried out on a part of the UK network fed by a biomethane plant and measure the increase in output of the plant over a 12 month period.