An update on the work done by SERL since August 2017

As our website goes live in July 2019 and we begin recruitment of households to share their smart meter data, here is a quick history on the work done by the Smart Energy Research Lab (SERL) up to this point.

After going through the bidding and funding process with the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the SERL team began work in August 2017. £6m was allocated over 5 years to fund a consortium of seven universities and the Energy Saving Trust. The task was to create a data portal and programme of research using smart meter data to get a better understanding of GB domestic energy use. The research findings will help make the UK more energy efficient, help protect the environment and help reduce future energy bills. SERL was also tasked with recruiting an initial 10,000 households to take part in the study.

SMRP to SERL

SERL was originally called the Smart Meter Research Portal (SMRP) but the name was changed in January 2019 to give a better reflection of the wide range of work being done by the project of which the portal is only one component.

Building the infrastructure

Before data collection could begin there was a great deal of technical and data governance infrastructure to put in place. The UK Data Archive team at the University of Essex led on constructing from scratch the technical infrastructure that would allow smart meter data to be drawn from the Data Communications Company (DCC) Gateway in a safe and secure way. The IT company CGI worked with the SERL team to build the adapter that was required to connect the SERL portal and DCC gateway, a crucial part of the infrastructure.

Safety and security of households’ data was also at the forefront of the complicated work done to ensure that SERL’s Data Governance Framework complied with the Smart Energy Code (SEC) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as meeting the highest standards for research ethics and data security. We are now at the stage of beginning to recruit participants, plan out research projects and prepare for the SERL portal to go live in late 2019. The work has been carried out in the new and fast-moving field of smart meter data technology and SERL has helped lay the groundwork for future work in this field.

The data

Once per day SERL will collect a set of half-hourly electricity and/or gas meter readings from consenting households. Households will also fill in an optional survey giving some more detail about their household and home. This information will be anonymised and will never be available in identifiable form. The data will allow researchers to build a much more detailed picture of the way energy is used across the country, allowing them to gather evidence that can inform government policies, help consumers save money and energy and allow power companies to offer more tailored and cheaper tariffs to customers. Initially SERL will be gathering data from second generation or SMETS2 meters, which are not tied to particular energy companies and can be accessed through the Data Communications (DCC) Gateway. There are around 1.5m of these meters across Great Britain. The government plans to have the c12m SMETS1 meters across GB upgraded to be compatible with the DCC Gateway by the end of 2020 and this will also allow SERL to recruit from among homes with these types of meters.

Recruitment

The team have been working with research company Ipsos MORI since January 2019 to develop a campaign to show the importance of sharing data with SERL to potential participant households. The first wave of participant recruitment begins in August 2019 and the team hope to recruit around 2,000 households to be the first SERL participants. This is an exciting time for the project as real data will begin to flow through the systems that have been created.

The research

With the infrastructure in place and data beginning to go into the portal in autumn 2019, researchers will be able to begin new projects with the newly available fine-grained smart meter data. The first SERL projects will be carried out by members of the SERL consortium. Potential projects will be submitted to a Research Programme Board (RPB) and a Data Governance Board (DGB). The RPB’s job is to make sure that the projects proposed will be a good use of the available funding to gain new knowledge about energy use for the public good. The DGB will check that the proposed use of the data meets the highest ethical and legal standards and that the rights of the households – who are the owners of the data – are fully respected.

Tadj Oreszczyn, Professor of Energy and Environment at University College London and Principal Investigator of SERL says: ‘it’s a very exciting time for the project as we being to recruit real-life participants and approach the ‘go-live’ date of the portal. We hope that SERL will enable a new generation of energy use research that can help address some of the biggest challenges facing our society today’.

‘A lot of background work has been carried out in the last year and a half to ensure that our systems are robust and secure both in terms of technical construction as well as keeping to the highest legal and ethical standards’ said Simon Elam, SERL Director, ‘as the data begins to flow, we move into a new phase of the project which will entail fine-tuning our systems and beginning to carry out some novel research’.

More information for participants

More information for researchers