About SERL

The Smart Energy Research Lab (SERL) provides a secure, consistent and trusted channel for researchers to access high-resolution energy data, which will facilitate innovative energy research for years to come. SERL is funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and comprises a consortium of seven UK universities and the Energy Saving Trust.

Our initial work programme focuses on:

• establishing a Smart Energy Observatory of ~10,000 smart metered households across Great Britain;
• using the Smart Energy Observatory to conduct novel energy use research;
• developing a mechanism for other researchers to access smart meter data for other household samples from whom they have obtained informed consent.

Data releases

Observatory Data

• Data: Smart Energy Research Lab Observatory Data, 2019-2020: Secure Access
  • Edition 4 - 11 October 2021: all SERL data up to and including 31 May 2021, which includes participant households recruited in Waves 1, 2 and 3 (~ 10,000+ households)
  • Edition 3 - 26 April 2021: all SERL data up to and including 31 October 2020, which includes participant households recruited in Waves 1 and 2 (~ 4,671 households)
  • Edition 2 - 19 November 2020: Change of citation
  • Edition 1 - initial release of Wave 1 recruitment (~ 1,700 households)
• Pre-processing code

Exploratory Data

In addition to the Observatory data, the Smart Energy Research Lab Exploratory Data, 2019-2020 was an initial part of the SERL project and for use by SERL researchers to conduct exploratory analysis ahead of provisioning SERL data to the wider academic research community.

• Data: Smart Energy Research Lab Exploratory Data, 2019-2020: Secure Access

SERL on github

We are using github to:

• manage the collaborative development of our code base and documentation. Inevitably this means that some of our repos are private to the SERL team;
• provide open source re-usable code examples and tips for data users;
• enable reproducibility through transparency of code and data;
• build a smart energy community of practice around the SERL data releases;
• encourage collaboration and contribution to the SERL code base so we can all work better and faster.

Tools

• seRl R package

Feedback

We use repo issues to collect feedback:

• feedback on these about pages
• feedback on the Observatory data documentation
• feedback on the Observatory data R package