LUKES (Longitudinal UK Energy Survey)

In order to achieve the rapid decarbonisation legislated in the UK Climate Change Act 2008, it will be necessary to have largely decarbonised the UK housing stock by 2040 in order to allow some headroom for carbon emissions from less easily decarbonised sectors of the economy.
To put the speed of this transition in context, it is a period equivalent to one generation, around two boiler replacements, approximately four times the average time a household stays in a dwelling (~7 years), or 5 fixed-term parliaments. To effect change at this rate requires ways of measuring and monitoring energy that can track the rate at which different groups (cohorts) change energy demand, explain how they differ, why they differ, and provide insights into how we may accelerate positive changes and counteract negative ones. We currently have no mechanism in place capable of doing this, the LUKES is designed to provide such a capability.

The costs of retrofitting and upgrading buildings, installing distributed generation systems, and smart-energy control systems to decarbonise the residential sector is in the hundreds of billions. The provision of detailed, disaggregated, data for better targeting the upgrading the energy system, from building retrofit, to installation of distributed generation at the home or district scale, to smart-energy infrastructure is therefore of paramount importance in minimising the overall financial costs and political risks of meeting the decarbonisation targets. This requires understanding how to match the physical form and fabric of dwellings, to technically appropriate heating systems, and to consumer segments that will accept and use these systems appropriately. This is an intrinsically socio-technical issue, as we know that prior experience of heating and control technologies influences acceptability of new systems, and that, for example, the efficiency of heat pumps is influenced by the thermal time-constant of the dwelling. These effects make both the matching, and the sequencing of interventions critical to efficiency and acceptability of large-scale energy system programmes. While these interactions are known from case studies, they have never been quantified at the National scale in ways that would allow development of National scale programmes, or in ways that would allow for the identification of target market segments from available data. The need for understanding sequential effects necessitates the longitudinal nature of LUKES, while the need to understand social as well as technical feasibility and their interactions necessitates the socio-technical nature of LUKES.

UK public sector R&D expenditure on energy research has risen sharply in the last decade with current spending around £300 million per annum. This expenditure has gone into a large range of initiatives across organisations including DECC, RCUK, TSB, ETI, Ofgem, Carbon Trust and others. These recent initiatives can be categorised broadly along the following lines:

• Whole energy systems modelling initiatives
• Whole energy systems research and development initiatives
• Big data initiatives
• Smart-grid initiatives
• Catalytic and coordinating energy research initiates

Collectively, these initiatives vary in their aims, but none of these initiatives provides, or plans to provide, a fundamental overview of energy demand in homes at the national scale, or its social, physical and environmental drivers and their rates of change. Each of these initiatives however, will be significantly enhanced through having access to such data. LUKES is designed to add value to existing UK investment in energy RD&D.

Workshops held across government departments and the academic community identified the common need for high quality, disaggregated, socio-technical data on energy demand. The government driver was the need for strategic oversight of how energy is used across all major household and dwelling combinations differentiated by energy end use in the home. The academic driver was the need for a 'statistical backcloth' into which smaller scale studies could be attached in order to contextualise these studies against the national picture. There was common concern that this data be provided to national statistical standards, in a timely manner, and to known degrees of accuracy and precision that took into account instrument accuracy as well as sampling errors. All parties wanted the capacity to disaggregate the data by household characteristics, dwelling characteristics, heating system technology characteristics, geographic region, and have disaggregated end use energy demand data within the home. Government sought the capacity to differentiate between such sectors to within a few per cent. LUKES is designed to provide data across the identified important sociodemographic, building demographic, technical and geographic sub sectors of the UK stock of homes to know levels of accuracy and precision.