We’re delighted to announce the release of our new SERL Stats Report (Smart Energy Research Lab: Energy use in GB domestic buildings 2022 and 2023).

The report

The report – Volume 2 of the SERL Statistical Reports Series – describes domestic gas and electricity energy use in Great Britain in 2022 and 2023 based on data from the Smart Energy Research Lab (SERL) Observatory, which consists of smart meter and contextual data from approximately 13,000 homes that are broadly representative of the GB domestic building stock along a range of geographic, building and socio-demographic characteristics.

The report provides an update to the statistics provided in Volume 1 of the SERL Statistical Report Series (Few et al., 2022), which covered 2021 data, and analyses residential energy use in GB in 2022 and 2023 (over the whole year, in each month and half-hourly over the course of the day). Statistics are presented for groups of homes with specific occupant characteristics (number of occupants, tenure), property characteristics (age, size, form, and Energy Performance Certificate (EPC)), heating systems, photovoltaics and electric vehicles, and by weather, region and IMD quintile.

Unless otherwise noted, the findings in the report relate to homes in the SERL Observatory that use gas as their main heating source and do not have photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation. The report also shows how metered residential energy use in GB varies over time from 2021 to 2023.

Access SERL data

The SERL Observatory data is available to UK accredited researchers via the UK Data Service. See Accessing SERL data for instructions on how to apply for access to use SERL data for your research. The SERL Observatory Sixth Edition of data will be made available in spring 2024 and will provide data from August 2018 until the end of 2023. We aim to release new editions with updated data every three to six months.

Lead author Dr Jessica Few (UCL Energy Institute) said: “It’s very exciting to be able to see from our data how energy use is distributed among Great Britain’s households. We hope the report and data released for the first time will be useful to researchers and policymakers looking to tackle the big societal issues we face.”

The study offers a unique glimpse at energy consumption across the country as it’s the only project to draw data directly from participating households’ smart meters and link it with a wide range of contextual data. This combined dataset allows the team to track energy consumption and compare that usage across a range of factors including time, regions, building types, socioeconomic status, occupancy, heating systems, weather conditions and the presence of an electric vehicle or photovoltaic solar panels.