Overview
NDSEMIC was project set up by BEIS with the aim of maximizing the potential energy savings from 3 sectors: hospitality, retail and school. City Science, in partnership with a consortium led by Hoare Lea were successful in obtaining BEIS funding developing an energy savings management and engagement platform focusing on Schools. The project scope was to develop energy management products and services which used smart meter data to help organization improvement the management of their energy consumption.
Solution Proposed and Outcome
and advice platform, ‘Untapped’ to enable schools to reduce their energy use and bills; thus, reducing carbon emissions. We developed the analytics tool and recommendation engine underpinning the platform which utilised smart meter data to provide schools with a full understanding of their energy consumption and provide a clear list of energy saving recommendations, as well as building the web-based platform
Our development of Untapped was successful in the production of an attractive and user-friendly platform which highlighted how the climate emergency could be tackled through enhanced energy consumption data availability and sharing alongside relatively light-touch interventions and policy changes.
Unique Challenges and Features
The challenges to overcome based on our project proposal were broad ranging and included:
- Automatically identifying when energy use was unlikely to match occupancy patterns in the school (i.e. when energy and cost savings could be made)
- Automatically identifying when faults may be occurring in school energy systems
- Automatically identifying when school energy plant controls were incorrectly set
- Articulating potential energy saving as well as the actions to take in a way that could be easily understood by the user
- The development of a compelling and engaging web-based platform for schools
- The development of lesson plans which could utilize the platform and overlapped with the national curriculum as far as possible
- Developing tailored energy saving targets for schools
Innovation
Our innovation in the delivery of this project was demonstrated by the following:
- City Science designed and built an advanced statistical library for analysing school smart meter data. The incoming data underwent 26 statistical tests which identified energy waste, actions to reduce energy waste as well as estimated energy and cost savings. The library also included estimation of optimal amounts of onsite generation from solar P.V. and battery storage solutions
- We heavily engaged end users within the school and energy managers for the report design, visualization and the articulation of recommendations
- Based on the outcomes of initial reports we engaged with the schools to develop an action plan of setting an energy saving target and utilizing the ranked report recommendations to achieve the target
- City Science developed an engaging and secure web-based platform which hosted the automated recommendation reports, school energy saving targets as well as tracked progress to achieving those targets, school smart meter data for projects and energy learning resources
- As a consortium we wanted to push to secure a better energy future and add social value. Hence, we engaged with schools to develop educational content, school projects and lesson plans which could be downloaded from the web-platform