Data-Driven Methods for a New National Household Energy Survey

We propose a programme of research leading to the establishment of a
new methodology for surveying household energy use nationally, to
complement existing methods (e.g., the English Housing Survey
and regional equivalents), which leverages the rollout of Smart Meters
to achieve cost-effective, detailed understanding of energy use
behaviours. The key enablers of this new methodology are: 1) the
Smart Meters themselves, 2) advances in semi-supervised disaggregation
methods which can infer the behaviours that result in energy use, and
3) other wireless sensors placed in some households to bootstrap the
disaggregation methods. The output will be twofold: a validated
scalable novel survey method suitable for national rollout, providing
significant additional data on energy consumption in UK homes; and 2)
an assessment of which variables can be effectively surveyed with this
method.

The smart meter rollout represents a £12 billion investment into
energy infrastructure. This proposal seeks to maximise the value to
the government and individual homeowners of that investment. For
government, the research could be of direct benefit in the evaluation
of the smart metering programme. In addition, both DECC and the Smart
Meter Central Delivery Body seek to maximise householder value through
the provision of timely, contextually relevant information about their
energy consuming; this will be enabled by the project's development of
methods for the identification of consumer behaviours from standard
smart meter data. The research will directly contribute to ongoing
DECC efforts to study of energy consumption in UK homes, to provide
the evidence base on which more robust energy demand policies can be
developed and evaluated.

In addition to the development of new national scale survey methods
and analytical techniques for the analysis of smart meter data the
research will directly result in an enhanced understanding of the
spatial density of sensing required in order to cost-effectively
capture data on occupants' energy consuming behaviours. This area of
research is currently seeing substantial commercial growth through the
emergence of a range of SMEs targeting the provision of home energy
management services. Such UK companies are seeking to gain first
mover advantage, via the UK rollout of smart meters, to establish
themselves as global leaders. This research will enable companies to
understand how best to deploy a limited number of sensors within homes
to effectively detect and manage energy consumption.