Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy use and contribute towards 30% of total CO2 emissions. With the Net Zero targets fast looming, there is a real push by government and businesses right now for a large number of stakeholders to be contributing towards creating a more sustainable and low carbon economy in the UK.

Smart meters have the core ability to give real-time energy data access, empowering consumers to make more strategic decisions on how they can best consume energy. Having this increased visibility over their own consumption data can allow consumers to alter their behaviour, so as to reduce their overall consumption and save on energy bills.

However, smart meters play a much larger role in the UKs transition to a smart energy system and will aid in the operation of Britain’s future energy system.

The Catapult’s Digital and Data team worked with Q Energy, a digital energy services company in the UK, who have developed a proposition for an energy management system which also enables Demand Side Response (DSR).

As effective DSR is heavily reliant on smart meters, we carried out an investigation into the different metering options and the ways in which the energy data can be captured. From this, we outlined four differing options along with their associated costs and potential use cases that Q Energy could use to inform their metering choices.

Key Points

Energy Systems Catapult was able to understand:

• What metering options currently exist, how this landscape is likely to change over time and what the most suitable options are for different sizes of organisation
• What rules and regulations were associated with smart meters and how organisations can apply methods to ensure they are following these
• What the use cases are for opening up smart meters, and how organisations can leverage this more granular energy data