OREANDA-NEWS. Hitachi, Ltd., Daikin Industries, Ltd., and Mizuho Bank, Ltd. announced that their consortium will commence the demonstration phase of the "Smart Community Project in Greater Manchester, UK." This project has been spearheaded by Japan's New Energy Development Organization ("NEDO"), with the consortium selected to execute the project.

The project has been planned based on a feasibility study implemented from June to the end of December 2013. The project will now move to a three-year demonstration phase running from April 2014 to the end of March 2017.

The project will see the delivery of Japanese cutting-edge technologies including heat pumps and ICT systems that will help to transform energy usage in the UK, and will demonstrate the use of technologies and systems that will contribute to the UK's transition to a low carbon society. As part of the feasibility study conducted from June to December 2013, the consortium conducted activities including the investigation of UK energy systems, and regulations, interviews of stakeholders including social housing corporations, and power distributors; and joint studies with local stakeholders. Accordingly, it has decided to commence the demonstration phase from April 2014.

In the demonstration phase, traditional gas-fired boilers of heating facilities in social housing will be replaced with electrical or hybrid heat-pumps, and an aggregation system will be introduced to control the heat pumps in each social housing property. This will facilitate coordination of the electricity usage at each property. At the same time, the consortium will aggregate the coordinated electrical power and investigate the capacity to balance the power supply-demand dynamics of residential power users.

Furthermore, hot water tanks will be installed with the heat pumps and residential heat retention functions to assess the impact on the capacity, thereby evaluating the feasibility of Demand Response (DR). Through these activities, the aim is to demonstrate the feasibility of aggregation systems and establish the Electricity Aggregation Business Model for the residential sector.

Further details of the project as well as background information about the four participating companies can be found below.