SENSE is a project looking to develop a new approach to providing energy services (insulation, energy contracts etc) to their residential customers. The aim is to be able to offer a tailored offer to a household – ideally one with whom they already have a gas and electricity contract. Customer engagement is clearly key to the success of this approach, across all stages: recruitment, conversion and deployment.
SENSE received a grant the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), under the Thermal Efficiency Innovation Fund. The grant is shared between 3 partners – Igloo Energy (lead), Foresight Group and the Energy and Climate Change Division (ECCD) at the University of Southampton. Research from the UK Energy Research Centres shows that by introducing cost effective measures, the country could save a quarter of the energy used by households by 2035.
The research will build on and further develop Igloo’s unique software that identifies suitable energy efficient upgrades for customers’ homes. The research will: analyse customers’ energy consumption; together with using insights gained from interacting with customers; and datasets that describe the homes we live in, the appliances we own and how we use them; as well as other available household data. As a result, Igloo will be able to understand the value to each customer of installing smart energy efficiency measures and provide each individual customer highly personalised recommendations to make it easier for them to reduce bills and therefore help the UK improve the energy efficiency of its housing stock.
ECCD will focus on customer engagement, and testing the recommendations, while the Foresight Group will investigate the delivery of low cost financing through innovative funding approaches within infrastructure and green energy to enable as many consumers as possible to benefit from the approach.