SERL consortium phase dissemination event held in London
SERL gathering
6th December saw representatives of the Smart Energy Research Lab (SERL) consortium gather at UCL in London to present research findings and celebrate the past 6 years of work on the project.
Daron Walker, Senior Responsible Owner for GB’s Smart Metering Implementation Programme at Department of Energy Security and Net Zero – and Chair of the SERL Independent Advisory Board since 2018 – opened the event and shared his thoughts on SERL
Daron talked about SERL being instrumental in giving the consumers who participated as part of the Observatory Panel of 13,000 participants “confidence and control over the use of their (energy) consumption data”, and in showing how large-scale data access can go co-exist with the highest standards of data privacy.
Powerful tool for policy makers
Daron Walker continued that SERL was a “powerful tool for policymakers” securing valuable insights into such topics as measuring real performance of buildings (as opposed to models) and giving comprehensive stats on demographic trends in energy consumption for use, amongst other things, in evaluation. The collaboration with DESNZ on the Smart Energy Savings programme showed that with innovative feedback – made possible by SERL – energy savings of up to 5% could potentially be achieved (beyond the original 3% predicted in the business case).
Daron also mentioned the importance of access to rapid evidence in a changing environment for example during covid and the energy cost crisis. He finished by saying that the continued further funding for SERL is a positive measure of the success and impact that SERL has already achieved and he hoped to continue to collaborate to maximise the potential of smart meter data.
Explanatory power
Next up was SERL Director Simon Elam who gave an overview of the successes of SERL since its inception in 2017, highlighting the explanatory power of the SERL dataset for investigating energy demand. For example, the dataset was able to explain between 63% and 83% of variation in daily household energy consumption, roughly twice the power of other studies and datasets.
There followed a series of presentations across various aspects of SERL research from the consortium partner projects including: the ‘Metrics of Building Performance’, ‘Diurnal/cyclical variations in energy use’, ‘Regional Energy Use’ and ‘Policy Evaluation and Counterfactual Uses of SERL’ – including government collaboration projects. The slides of all the presentations are available here and more information can be found at www.serl.ac.uk or contacting [email protected]
The future of SERL
SERL Principal Applicant Professor Tadj Oreszczyn closed the event with a preview of the new Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory project (www.edol.uk) which builds on and continues the work of SERL. Finally he thanked all the researchers, stakeholders and members of advisory boards who had championed the work of SERL so far.
The event marked the end of the first ‘consortium’ phase of SERL which ran from December 2017 to August 2023 but the SERL resource and surrounding research such as the SERL Stats Report which will continue to be produced.
For more details on SERL see Key Documents
Access presentations from the event