University College London (UCL) and the University of Oxford will lead an £8.7m research project to establish an Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory (EDOL) in the UK.
The five-year programme, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, part of UK Research and Innovation) and working with BEIS, will establish a national energy data platform to provide a high-resolution data resource that will track energy use in real households (with informed consent of participants).
The EDOL will allow the researchers to understand how, why, and when domestic activity is impacting energy demand and associated carbon emissions.
EDOL will develop a range of innovative methods – including innovations emerging around AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) – for monitoring not only the energy consumed by different appliances, but also the different energy-using activities that make up daily life at home.
EDOL will consist of three elements:
- An ‘Observatory’ of 2000 representative UK households equipped with sensors to record the energy used by occupants, their appliances, and their behaviours. The anonymised data will then be analysed by researchers to better understand patterns of energy demand in our homes.
- ‘Forensic’ analyses of sub-samples of homes that have novel or lesser-known forms of energy demand (for instance, smart charging of electric vehicles). This could include detailed surveys, interviews, and in-depth monitoring.
- ‘Field laboratories’ 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. This will allow the researchers to answer novel questions, such as: ‘How flexible is the time when people choose to charge their electric vehicles?’, or ‘Does installing a heat pump have unintended consequences such as increased tumble drying of clothes due to lower radiator temperatures?’
Professor Tadj Oreszczyn (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.
The University of Oxford will lead on instrumentation and analysis, and qualitative research, overseen by Dr Philip Grünewald (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) and Dr Tina Fawcett (School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford).
Dr Grünewald said:
EDOL will raise evidence-based policy making to a new level, by providing a scientifically rigorous demand observatory. This collaboration will be unique in providing a detailed, longitudinal resource of UK domestic energy use which will be available to scientists, industry, and policy-makers. The research will be dynamic, able to respond to a fast-moving technological and policy landscape, and will enable us to propose cost-effective smart data solutions and innovation in real-time and at scale.
