Alison Halford, Jonathan D. Nixon, Jeffrey Hardy and Elena Gaura
August 2023
SLES can provide resilient, sustainable, and affordable energy systems to improve the well-being of all. However,
there are still challenges that prevent rapid uptake and wider deployment of viable SLES solutions (Fell et al., 2020).
On 14th March 2023, researchers from the EnergyREV workstream on Cyber-Physical Advances in Smart Local
Energy Systems organised a Decision Theatre workshop for energy stakeholders to identify some of the challenges
to transition to fully digitised, flexibly interconnected, multi-layer plug-and-play architectures.
This paper is a summary of the Decision Theatre outcomes. These outcomes can aid funders, researchers, and other
bodies, such as the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), in the following ways:
1. Providing insights into gaps in knowledge and challenges to architecting, implementing, and embedding
SLES.
2. Suggesting multidisciplinary research opportunities that produce new methods and approaches to accelerate
the UK energy digitisation and digitalisation.
3. Offering guidance for future research that looks to address the barriers to, and realise the benefits of SLES, to
support UK net-zero objectives.