In a report released this week, the Green Finance Institute laid out its vision for developing market solutions to scale up building energy efficiency in the U.K. through a series of pilot projects ("demonstrators"), including one which would roll out metered energy consumption calibrated to homes in the U.K.

”Citizens, communities, and economies are facing the two greatest challenges of our times: climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. The response to both these crises is rooted in science and innovation, as we seek solutions to monitor, mitigate, and adapt to the impacts of coronavirus and our changing climate.”

The Report outlines a portfolio of over 20 ‘demonstrator’ projects, comprising financial products and services designed to overcome the challenges identified by the Coalition, seeks to appeal across the market’s breadth of housing tenures, socioeconomic and geographic profiles, interact with existing energy efficiency initiatives and inform government policy. 

One of the recommended demonstrator projects is focused on Metered Energy Savings.

Real-time energy savings provide an evidence base to support the design of new and targeted financial products - including several concepts presented in this report – and could unlock a wider overhaul of building data to enable the flow of retrofit finance, especially if linked to existing datasets such as the EPC register. The concept has ramifications for data use by utilities and energy companies, whilst also building confidence amongst homeowners on the long-term financial benefits of energy efficiency measures.

Included is a case study on the application of Metered Energy Savings in the United States, which points to Recurve's work in California, New York, and Oregon as examples of how using open source, weather-normalized metered efficiency to calculate changes in energy consumption can improve feedback loops and provide the confidence in results needed to drive private sector investment.  

Read the full report here.