Universities to launch national energy data platform

A new multi-million pound project led by two UK universities is aiming to establish a national energy data platform to help facilitate the net zero transition.

Led by University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford, the £8.7 million project will establish an Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory (EDOL).

The five-year project is being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, and will work with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

While the UK’s climate ambitions will require the end of natural gas use in domestic energy consumption and the transition to a low-carbon system, there is currently little information on how this will impact patterns of energy usage, and whether this will overlap with other changes to the energy system, including the increased uptake of electric cars and heat pumps.

EDOL will address this by providing a “high-resolution data resource” that will track energy use in real households to understand how, why and when domestic activity is impacting demand and associated carbon emissions.

The project will consist of three elements including an “observatory” of 2,000 representative UK households which will be equipped with sensors to record the energy used by occupants, their appliances, and their behaviours.

Data generated will be anonymised and analysed by researchers to better understand patterns of domestic energy demand.

The second element will involve forensic analysis of sub-samples of homes that have novel or lesser-utilised forms of energy demand such as the smart charging of electric vehicles. This could include detailed surveys, interviews, and in-depth monitoring.

Meanwhile the third stage will include “field laboratories” consisting of 100-200 households in which policies, technologies, business models, and other interventions can be tried out and compared to relevant control groups in the observatory.

As well as overall management of the project, UCL Energy Institute will be leading on data collection, analysis, and governance. It will build on relevant experience developed via the Smart Energy Research Lab project, bringing specific expertise regarding innovative techniques for analysing smart meter data.

The University of Oxford meanwhile will lead on instrumentation and analysis, and qualitative research, overseen by Dr Philip Grünewald of the university’s Department of Engineering Science, as well as Dr Tina Fawcett from the School of Geography and the Environment.

Grünewald was asked by Utility Week about the timescales involved and how quickly results of the project will feed through to policy decisions.

He said: “The principle behind the whole investment is that in the past, we very often tried to do things too ad-hoc and too quickly. This project is very deliberately trying to test all the monitoring equipment very carefully in advance in these laboratories, before rolling them out into this observatory.”

While he admitted that it will take time to set up the project, once the infrastructure is in place policy assessments can be conducted “very quickly”.

Professor Tadj Oreszczyn of the UCL Energy Institute, principal investigator for the project, said: “In order to tackle the serious challenges facing our society such as fuel poverty, the energy cost crisis and climate change, we need accurate real-world energy consumption data combined with additional data-streams from, for example, sensors and smart home devices, to facilitate innovative research.

“EDOL is a major step forward in enabling research for public benefit using cutting edge technology and research techniques.”