Comment by Richard Snape, Senior Modelling Consultant at Energy Systems Catapult and Co-director of the Smart Energy Data Service (SENSE) at UK Research & Innovation
As my colleagues from other data services have noted, more data is collected about what we do than ever before, which brings opportunities to tackle some of our greatest challenges. Data about how we use energy is no exception. What if all this data could be used to drive real innovation and a fair transition to Net Zero?
The energy system is changing fast. In just ten years from 2014 to 2024, UK carbon emissions from generating electricity dropped by 70%. In October 2024, the last coal-fired power station in the UK ceased operations. At the same time, sales of electric vehicles are booming. More and more people are installing heat pumps to heat their homes.
Both supply and demand are changing across electricity, natural gas and fuel for our cars. We need less traditional natural gas for heating and less petrol for getting around, and we’re replacing both with electricity. We must innovate to deliver an electricity system that can handle intermittent renewable energy (like solar and wind generation) combined with increasing demand for electricity overall. This transition needs to be affordable, fast and fair.
At the Energy Systems Catapult, we work on this every day. We’ve done some initial analysis that shows how the transition to electrical heating and mobility might change demand patterns, specifically overnight peak demand for EV charging and household energy demand during the coldest days of the year.
There is much more that we could gain from a deeper understanding of the day-to-day behaviours and economic factors that drive our use of energy. We need to understand what people do with their time in and outside of their homes and how that is changing with the use of new technologies. Without this information, it’s impossible to understand what our energy system will need to be like in the future.
Making our homes more energy efficient is great, but think about where else we spend our time – offices, gyms, shopping centres and schools. These buildings can use smart energy management systems to keep us comfortable while we work and play.
These smart systems control things like:
But here’s the key: to make these systems work, we need to understand how people actually use the buildings. Are meeting rooms empty most afternoons? Does the gym get packed at lunchtime? Is the library quiet on Fridays? How many more people go shopping at Christmas?
This becomes especially important in places with lots of buildings spread across one site. Think of a university campus with dozens of lecture halls, labs and dorms or a hospital complex with multiple wings and departments.
When we understand the patterns of how these buildings are used, we can fine-tune the energy systems in each individual building. Even better, we can coordinate them across the entire site to save energy without anyone feeling too hot, too cold, or left in the dark.
The result? Comfortable spaces that don’t waste energy heating empty rooms or cooling buildings when no one’s there.
The short answer is lots. Some organisations gather data on electricity or gas use in our homes and businesses from smart meters, giving a direct window into how energy is used. Others collate travel records, building occupancy levels, transaction data and many other pieces of data that give indirect information on energy use.
This data can be brought together to build a picture of our changing energy system. By combining this data and making it available to researchers, we can help them to tackle critical questions such as “Are we using energy to get the best outcomes in hospitals?” This can substantially increase the social value of collecting the data.
We must bolster public trust in research use of smart data. To do that, we’ve got to have the right processes to safeguard potentially sensitive data. Two important ways to protect privacy are anonymisation (removing identifiable details) and aggregation (combining lots of people’s data together).
For the most sensitive data, there’s also an exciting new option: ‘synthetic data.’ This is artificially created data that mimics all the patterns of real data but doesn’t contain anyone’s actual information—like a realistic simulation that researchers can safely analyse.
With those safeguards in place and with lots of data coming through, we can give real insight into how our daily, weekly or seasonal patterns influence energy use at home, at work or during our leisure activities. It’s crucial to do this while at the same time being open about what we’re doing and how.
Our vision for SENSE, the Smart Energy Data Service, is to become the UK’s go-to platform for smart energy data. We’re building a system that brings together diverse sets of information about when people use energy, how much they consume and how the energy network operates.
This will help researchers, innovators and policymakers work from the same reliable data to tackle our biggest challenges – from reaching Net Zero to making energy and electric vehicles more affordable and sustainable for everyone.
Becoming the trusted source for smart energy data is not just about talking to data partners and publishing raw datasets (although that very much is part of it!). As well as that, we have data scientists on board to curate our datasets into high-quality usable data products. Our researchers will themselves use the data we collect to prepare answers to timely research questions.
Finally, a big part of our work is connecting with the outside world, both in academia and industry, to make them aware of the data we have, the service we provide and to check that we are collecting the right data to answer the right questions.
For our first year, SENSE is focusing on two key areas:
We’ve had a busy six months getting SENSE off the ground, and we’re on track to launch publicly in early 2026. Over the coming months, I’m excited to see our researchers dig into the data we’ve collected, while our development team continues building out the platform.
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