Generating Insights from Smart Meter Data: Challenges and Opportunities

About the seminar:

The introduction of smart meter technology has been central to recent innovations in energy provision for the UK residential sector. Smart meters have the potential to give greater insight into energy consumption behaviour for energy providers and researchers alike. For example, they may aid our understanding of how the consumption of gas and electricity may be replaced by the energy from renewable sources, or how consumer behaviours can be changed to reduce overall energy consumption, increase efficiency, and lessen the pressure on the national grid networks. The advantage of a thorough understanding of the insights generated from smart meter data for policy issues may sound obvious at a first glance. However, there are significant challenges associated with the availability of methods and computation necessary to perform a complete analysis of the available data. The talk provides an in depth look at the nature of energy consumption through an analysis of big data that is recorded by around 400,000 smart meters installed at residential properties across the UK. It further discusses how this data is different from perhaps more conventionally collected retail consumer data, and in what way does the temporal nature of these data reveal information about the customers dynamics without compromising their anonymity.

About the speaker:

Dr Anastasia Ushakova

Anastasia is a Teaching Fellow in Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research, in collaboration with one of the large domestic energy providers in the UK, was concerned with big data analysis of smart meter data. The motivation behind her work was to explore whether there is a potential for big data to inform public policy and decision making in energy sector, she used computational statistics methods to study these questions. Her research and teaching interests are spanned broadly across the area of quantitative methods for social science and interdisciplinary research, new forms of data and novel methods and technology that can be used to analyse it. She is passionate about both development and application of statistical methods as well as promoting those to new generation of interdisciplinary researchers.

Further information:

The presentation will promptly start at 5:30pm and will be followed by drinks and nibbles.

We expect this event to be extremely popular, and places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. We will release further tickets to the waiting list as they become available. If you are no longer able to attend, or have any questions please email bseer-communications@ucl.ac.uk

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