Energy, carbon and data: what’s worth knowing for your business?

Understanding your organisation’s environmental impact, and how this compares against UK net zero targets and your competitors environmental impacts, is a good place to start if you want to understand more about carbon reduction. The role of businesses in supporting and delivering the UK’s net zero ambitions is already gaining traction, more so as we continue to understand the benefits of operating in a net zero society.

Understanding your energy data can help you make informed decisions about investing in low carbon options and can assist in decarbonising your operations. A lot of energy data is gathered and produced by the government, so it’s worth checking if any of this data is useful, but don’t discount more specific research from other independent bodies.

For UK national level statistics around net zero and climate change, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) provides advice and reports that monitor the UK’s progress in this area. They advise the government too and are likely to inform a lot of future energy-related policy decisions.

So how do we deal with data? Energy Saving Trust’s teams of researchers, modellers and data analysts continually look for new insights and data that can support our mission to address the climate emergency and inform government policies, as well as support projects from our clients and businesses across the UK.

This data might come from our own experience of product verification or field trials, research into the latest energy technologies, or through advanced energy modelling. We maintain databases of energy, financial and carbon saving information related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric vehicles.

Our Home Analytics service is a quick and efficient way to help you understand a particular housing stock, allowing you to focus on targeting your energy saving products and services effectively.

What sort of research and data analysis do we do?

• product verification – testing and verifying a product’s energy profile data to support energy saving claims
• energy modelling – energy, carbon dioxide (CO₂) and financial savings for different property types based on different energy efficiency or renewable energy measures
• primary and secondary research – useful for emerging technologies and low carbon projects, as we can identify gaps in the market, costs and savings, and policy approaches. We also undertake literature reviews and stakeholder mapping to build an accurate analysis
• evaluation – developing carbon emissions inventories, reporting the impacts of carbon reduction programmes, providing evidence, customer feedback and monitoring tools for in-house use

Our research, analytics and energy modelling are carried out to address a specific client problem, for example, if they need data on how much energy their product would save in-situ or how effective their fuel poverty programme would be if they installed certain energy efficiency measures in particular homes.

Our InFact savings and statistics bulletin is a pre-packaged and ready-to-use factsheet for energy-based communications that has been used by many businesses. We’ve also worked with organisations such as CCC, BEIS, Co-Heat and Ofgem to analyse, evaluate and complete reports for various bespoke projects.

What sort of data, evaluation or energy modelling is best for your organisation? It’s best to think about your objectives, messaging or core goals and work backwards from there. If you’re unsure, or if you need support gathering or analysing data for your organisation, get in touch with us.

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