The Energy and Environment Open Data Challenge was a part of The Open Data Challenge Prize Series, which was a series of seven challenge prizes to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social challenges. It was funded by the Technology Strategy Board,(now known as Innovate UK) and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, now known as the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The Challenge posed the following question, which it incentivized innovators to solve:
How can we use open data to build services that support communities to:
Open data has the potential to power tools that provide solutions to real problems. Although the UK is the world leader in releasing open data, its use in informing real world solutions has been limited and fragmented, with innovative start-ups lacking support and data expertise to scale to a sustainable business level.
This series of challenges aimed to galvanise a new community to use open data as the key ingredient in helping solve social problems. The challenges helped SMEs and start-ups to work with data providers, industry experts and business leaders to develop new ways to reuse available data, creating sustainable business opportunities.
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Community Energy Manager (CEM) is a platform to help community energy groups undertake projects and take advantage of energy-saving interventions from Government and energy companies. It will also help communities bulk-buy energy and potentially undertake energy generation projects.
Open data sources enable community energy groups to understand the feasibility of different projects in their area with things like housing stock and energy usage in mind.
CEM simplifies and standardises a complex process helping community energy groups learn from each other and share tools and approaches. Matt and Mark drew on their experiences at Bioregional and Easton Energy Group and applied user research to pinpoint a central issue in the community energy market.
In the short-term, the platform will stimulate more community energy projects, more energy- efficient homes and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
CEM are testing and exploring revenue streams like referral fees for installers of energy efficiency products. For instance, if a group wants to launch a share offer for renewable energy investment, CEM can help facilitate this.
Community Energy Manager will be launched in mid-April.
An evaluation of the ODCS undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that for every pound spent on the ODCS there was likely to be a return to the economy of between £5-£10 after three years. The aggregated economic impacts for the finalists in the Energy and Environment Challenge suggested that the potential benefits by year three of this challenge, assuming no business failures, would be between: 14 to 26 jobs; £1.2m to £1.9m Gross Value Added (GVA) (in Net Present Value (NPV) terms); and, £19.3m to £32.1m social impacts (in NPV terms) and £3.4m to £5.6m environmental impacts (in NPV terms).
Energy Schools turns schools into hubs for community energy initiatives and helps students to become “community energy ambassadors”.
Energy Benchmarking Plus / Locatable helps homeowners and communities to compete and communicate on energy performance in a transparent way.
