Warrington ReWire's story
The REWIRE project is a research project funded by Innovate UK, the UK government's innovation support service. It is part of the Prospering from the Energy Revolution Smart Local Energy Systems programme. The aim is to demonstrate how Smart Local Energy Systems can be developed in the future.
Smart Local Energy Systems should be an important part of cutting carbon in the future, but we need the tools to help create them now. The REWIRE project is working with Warrington Council and a consortium of 10 partners from across the energy sector to develop plans to decarbonise the borough of Warrington and identify the investments and business models that are required to make it happen. The project has developed a cutting edge 'Digital Twin' simulation of the Warrington built environment to support this process.
The digital twin is an important tool to enable different scenarios to be tested and so help plan the optimisation of local energy infrastructure to save carbon at the least cost.
The project was formed by Pure Leapfrog, a merge of two charities dedicated to the support of community energy, and draws on its expertise in carbon, sustainable finance, energy systems, and natural capital that promote our wider goals of sustainability and decarbonisation.
Useful learnings from Warrington ReWire
ReWire is a research project exploring new design systems and business models for locality whole system decarbonisation. As it is an innovation project the outputs will be used to inform future work.
The main challenge for the project has been accessing the data required to build our digital twin model and to reach and engage with the local community: effective community engagement is key.
Warrington ReWire's metrics
Number of investment opportunities and business models identified through the research project and whether any of these lead to investments and implementation.
