Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory (EDOL) is supported by £8.7m from EPSRC and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Energy use in homes accounts for almost a fifth of UK carbon emissions, and the biggest driver of increased energy demands during the peak winter period.
If the UK is to reach net zero emissions by 2050, domestic energy will have transition away from natural gas and adopt a fully-electric system, but there is currently very little information on how this will impact patterns of energy usage, and whether this will overlap with other changes to the UK’s energy system including the increased uptake of electric cars and heat pumps.
The EDOL will address this by providing a high-resolution data resource that will track energy use in real households.
To do so, EDOL will develop a range of i methods, including innovations emerging around artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things that will monitor the energy consumed by different appliances and the different energy-using activities that make up daily life at home.
In a statement, EPSRC director for Cross-Council Programmes, Dr Kedar Pandya, said: “Accurate, high-resolution data will be crucial to understanding energy usage across UK households and informing new forms of energy usage.
“With support from government, the EDOL will build on the work of the Smart Energy Research Lab to address this need.
“It will offer unprecedented scale in providing this data, which will support the decisions needed to help us to reduce carbon emissions and make the switch to net zero.”
EDOL will consist of 3 elements
An ‘observatory’ of 2,000 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 people’s homes ‘Forensic’ analyses of sub-samples of homes that have novel or lesser-known forms of energy demand (such as smart charging of electric vehicles). This could include detailed surveys, interviews, and in-depth monitoring ‘Field laboratories’ of 100 to 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?’ • ‘does installing a heat pump have unintended consequences such as increased tumble drying of cloths due to lower radiator temperatures?’
Co-lead Dr Philipp Grünewald from Oxford University said: “EDOL will raise evidence-based policymaking 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 policymakers.
“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.”
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