Challenge 1: Develop a data platform for power and heat usage with sufficient granularity to identify community trends and individual usage patterns in both domestic and commercial buildings.

Title: Energy Data Integration System (EDIS)

The Ricardo-AEA Energy Data Integration System (EDIS) project will develop and evaluate a prototype platform that will model energy demand and savings opportunities. The project will then demonstrate the platform’s breadth of potential application and the commercial approach through a set of example studies aligned to our partner city’s specific interests. Working with Coventry City Council, and with support from key industry partners, our project will also demonstrate the data brokerage solution necessary to overcome confidentiality barriers associated with sharing of actual energy data. The resulting platform, and its replicable application to other cities throughout the UK, will support informed decisions by city authorities and utility companies, as well as the wider community, based on a shared and evidenced understanding of heat and power use at a granular level.

Built in a cloud-based delivery model, the platform’s governing software, modelling and associated data will be centrally and securely hosted, with its ‘user-clients’ (eg the cities, energy providers, stakeholders) accessing the platform via dedicated portals (eg web browsers), to provide them with a highly tailored / personalised user-experience and interface. The system’s architecture will be scalable from the outset, to not only allow for the breadth and volumes of heat and energy data, but also to allow for future expansion / extension into other data areas (eg transport, air quality), and to add further value by allowing combined data patterns to emerge. A highly intuitive user-interface will enable rapid modelling and sophisticated interrogation of the data, including fully integrated GIS visualisation. Granularity will be provided down to building level, while aggregation of that data will enable analysis of city zones to be reviewed and assessed.

Within this two year project, an advisory group comprising city representatives, power companies and community groups will work in partnership with us to review and guide the work, ensuring it develops to take account of the functionality needed now and into the future. We will demonstrate EDIS’s breadth of application via case studies aligned to our partner city’s specific interests and needs, and thoroughly examine and define EDIS’s commercialisation potential