10100736Project HERTIA (Helping the Energy Revolution Through Insights and Automated services)ClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKThe energy crisis led many small businesses to seek help to understand their energy consumption. With prices expected to remain high, many now see the value of using ongoing detailed energy consumption data to make informed decisions, reduce energy costs and cut carbon emissions. Yet, there's a lack of low-cost digital products right for smaller businesses. Some utilities offer energy analysis dashboards, but this only helps if you stick with one supplier. Tracking and forecasting is limited, as the data doesn't go back beyond 14 months. Independent software is costly: Energy Systems Catapult reports one business considering an energy dashboard with a 12 year payback. Surple started developing energy management software for larger businesses. Surple saw the need for help from small companies, so produced a simplified version offering visualisation of energy data. With the help of UKRI and the Design Council, it now seeks to include more automated supportive features to help resource-constrained SMEs take action to make energy savings. The dashboard aims to prompt businesses to make 'quick wins', with low-cost energy waste reduction and efficiency tips tailored to the user. These are small changes, but together they can add up to reductions of around 20% in energy use. This project also seeks to help SMEs plan their next steps for the energy transition. Within a decade the average small businesses will need to invest £280,000 to achieve net zero. Most SMEs say cost is the key barrier to reaching this goal. But, digging deeper, the problem is more precisely the long and uncertain payback times of energy efficient and low-carbon technologies, which stretch beyond an SME's typical investment horizons. Partnering with Go for Zero, Surple's platform will incorporate cleantech assessments, showing potential for electrification of fleets, energy generation and smart energy use. These give an SME a chance to identify, understand and prioritise the options in their unique route to net zero. The platform will be trialled in a 'living lab' comprising a cohort of Yü energy's 20,000 existing SME customers. This is an opportunity to better understand the impact of messaging and market requirements for a net zero tool. SMEs will be involved in the cocreation of the tool at each stage, for example, rating clarity and usability.