The UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded a five-year project to develop a Smart Energy Research Lab (SERL) to provide vital access to energy data for the UK research community.
The initial project ran from August 2017 to August 2023 (including a one year no-cost extension period) and the SERL dataset has been available to researchers since August 2020. The original project was a consortium of seven UK universities and the Energy Saving Trust.
Vision
Our vision is to deliver a world-class research portal that will support a multi-disciplinary research programme. The portal will transform UK energy research through the long-term provision of high-quality, high-resolution energy data that will provide a reliable evidence base for intervention, observational and longitudinal studies across the socio-technical spectrum.
The goals of the lab are to provide:
- A consistent, trusted, and sustainable channel for researchers to access large-scale, high-resolution energy data, thereby providing reliable empirical data for research
- An effective mechanism for collecting energy data alongside other variables from national surveys or individual research projects
- A confidential, ongoing repository of smart meter data enhanced with contextual dwelling, household and neighbourhood attributes for use in primary and secondary data analysis
The ambition of the research programme is to undertake research that will:
- Support government policy
- Kick-start the development of new products, services and energy markets
- Help provide solutions to the energy trilemma (security, affordability and sustainability)
- Facilitate better research by developing best practice guidelines and methods to improve data privacy and enable innovative uses of smart meter data.
See Key Documents for more detail on specific aspects of SERL.
NB. This project was previously known as the Smart Meter Research Portal (SMRP).