Energy Systems Catapult is home to the Living Lab – which works directly with more than 5,000 UK households, gathering valuable insights on how energy is being used by real people in real homes, and what it means for innovators looking to make a name for themselves in the clean energy transition.
The Living Lab captures energy data from homes via smart meters, smart heating controls, battery storage, solar panels, electric vehicles and chargers, heat meters and more. Our participants also provide information about themselves, their homes, and their households which helps us interpret their energy data.
Following the launch of our first ‘off the peg’ datasets for SMEs and startups, we caught up with the Living Lab’s Claire Rowland (Senior Manager, Living Lab and WESA) and Simon Ball (Data and Analytics Manager) to ask how companies might use this data to cost-effectively gather the evidence they need to create new products and services.
Datasets, now with added context
“We’re targeting these four new dataset packages at startups and SMEs,” Claire explains, “because we’ve heard from them that their needs are not being met by what’s currently available in the market.”
While other providers can offer large sets of data from domestic smart meters, these are expensive and don’t come with any information about the homes themselves, such as the number of occupants and the energy-using technologies they have installed.
The Living Lab data has been providing data to customers for several years already, but up until now each request had required a bespoke data export, which was proving expensive for startups.
“There isn’t anyone else providing services that startups can afford. We’re providing them with data and the context to interpret it,” Claire says.
Simon adds: “It will help companies interested in understanding their potential customer base. It helps to have the contextual data – to be able to start asking how does this group of potential customers behave differently to this other set?”
What could it be used to develop?
“We’re seeing this data mainly being used at a very early stage of product innovation. It will help SMEs understand an opportunity, build a concept, train a machine learning model or validate an idea.”
The four dataset packages, priced at £1,000 each provide 12 months of high quality 30-minute smart meter data and household profile information for up to 200 homes.
- Electricity and gas data from a diverse mix of homes.
- Electricity data from homes with electric vehicles.
- Electricity data from homes with heat pumps.
- Gas and electricity data from homes with gas heating and hot water.
There’s also a fifth dataset under development that will include internal temperatures within homes. All our datasets are effectively anonymised, to protect the identity of our participants.
Consumption analysis
We ask Claire and Simon about the ways SMEs and startups might use these packages to accelerate innovation.
“With the electricity and gas data, companies might use it for consumption pattern analysis, helping them develop new energy storage products.”
“Yes,” Simon adds, “They could develop segmentations and analyse the relationship with some of the key determinants of household energy consumption like number of occupants, number of bedrooms, property type.”
Claire says: “A company that’s looking to develop a battery could use the data to understand how much energy homes of different sizes are using at peak times. They could use this to understand how much storage these homes typically require and use that to size batteries that help consumers avoid using energy at peak times.”
Model training and market analysis
With the package offering electricity data from homes with electric vehicles, a customer might use the data to enable them to spot patterns in much larger datasets.
“There are lots of organisations looking at flexibility and wanting to develop virtual power plants,” Claire says. “You might be trying to predict at scale how much electric vehicle charging could be shifted around.”
Simon notes that companies could use the Catapult’s context-rich data to train models to identify the key identifiers for homes with and without electric cars.
“You could create a model for interrogating a much larger unlabelled dataset of smart meter data, which would help you identify homes with electric cars or other low carbon technologies.”
Under this scenario, a company at the early business-modelling stage would then have the insights to understand the size of available markets and prioritise where they should launch a service.
Claire says the same is true for the heat pump dataset, which could be used by companies looking to develop an energy-as-a-service proposition.
“If you’ve got the ‘ground truth data’, you can spot heat pumps in a larger data set of just smart meter data, and understand uptake better. That might lead you to say: ‘Look, our best market is Bristol. Let’s start there’.”
Internal temperature data incoming
Claire and Simon are excited about the potential for the Living Lab’s fifth dataset which will include smart meter data, internal temperature data and thermostat set point data. It’s set to be available in early 2026.
“We’ll know that somebody wanted their heating to be say 21°C, and the actual temperature in the home and how much energy was used to achieve that. That tells us a huge amount about the behaviour of the heating system, which tells you quite a lot about the energy efficiency of the building.”
This is likely to interest companies looking to launch and sell products to model energy efficiency in homes.
“There ideas are just the tip of the iceberg,” Claire says. “We’d love to speak to companies about how they could use the data, and we’d urge them to get in touch. For a small upfront cost, these packages can help innovators develop a concept and accelerate commercialisation. And of course, once they’ve taken that step and are ready to test a product on the market, the Living Lab is available to help them trial it with our network of over 5000 households.”
For more information on the anonymised datasets and the household information that’s included, visit here. We also welcome enquiries about our other data sets, including heating, electric vehicle charging, solar and battery usage.