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Professor Nick Jennings and his team are interested in optimising energy use within the local neighbourhood of the future. Here, some homes may have local generation, be it a photovoltaic panel or wind turbine, as well as a micro-storage device such as a redox flow battery or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Within such an environment, home-management agents twinned with sensors would interact with those of neighbouring homes to not only manage energy in-house but also trade locally-produced electricity on the neighbourhood energy market. "If you can trade electricity with your neighbour then it is more efficient for everyone as transmission losses are reduced,"explains Jennings. "In various Scandinavian countries right now they have neighbourhood storage models in which a number of people in the street or a small town get together and they all benefit. I think we will be seeing more of this 'localism' on a small scale, which we tend not to see very much at the moment".