Closed Smart Energy and Flexibility Trials

The short answer is that the big publicly funded smart energy trials and competitions have finished. The Smart Energy Savings Competition (SENS) provided up to £6.25 million to support the development, trialling and evaluation of innovative feedback products and services that used smart meter data to help households reduce their energy consumption¹. Five projects that had reached a suitable development stage were given matched grant funding and taken through to Phase 2, where they were trialled and evaluated through large scale household trials¹. That work is done, and the evaluation is published.

What remains is the evidence. The trials were built on a simple premise: the smart metering roll-out in Great Britain creates a new platform for innovation, increasing the level of detail and accuracy of energy consumption data and tariff information in domestic, microbusiness and SME sectors². A closed trial is not a dead end. It is a finished experiment whose findings feed into the rules that govern smart meters now, including the framework that runs to the end of 2030³.

For a household, the practical question is usually narrower: what did these projects actually test, what did they find, and is there anything left to join? This page answers that, and sets out what the results mean for a home trying to use less energy and depend less on what it buys from the grid.

What the trials were and what they tested

The Smart Energy Savings Competition was the centrepiece of government-funded household energy feedback testing. Its objectives were specific: identify innovative products and services using smart meter data that could deliver energy savings in homes, in excess of those currently identified in the smart meter impact assessment, for either the Great Britain population or specific groups within it; ensure that solutions were attractive and valued by consumers and were easily available, using existing technologies and delivery channels or cost-effective new hardware; and support the development of a domestic market for energy management products and services, securing investment from technology providers, energy suppliers, and third parties¹.

That third objective matters for independence. A trial that only proves a concept is a research result. A trial that builds a market leaves something behind that a household can buy and use without further public money.

The evaluation was independent. It was led by Ipsos in partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, the University of Edinburgh and Manchester Metropolitan University¹. The Smart Energy Research Laboratory (SERL) based at University College London was awarded a grant for the secure collection and provision of energy consumption data from trial households, with customer consent, to Ipsos for their analyses¹. Consent, in other words, was the mechanism by which household data entered the research.

Alongside the competition, the wider policy case rested on numbers that were already published. The government's 2019 estimate put the benefits of the smart meter rollout at £19.5 billion over the period 2013 to 2034, in 2011 prices⁶. The Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan, published in July 2017, estimated that flexibility could help people save up to £40bn on their energy bills in the coming decades⁵. The trials were the household-facing end of that argument: if the system is to be flexible, homes have to be able to respond, and feedback products are how homes learn to respond.

What the figures show

The headline figures from this field are a mix of funding, estimated benefit and measured participation, and they should be read as three different kinds of number.

Funding is the most concrete. SENS provided up to £6.25 million¹. The Welsh Government's Smart Living Initiative provided up to £50k to support delivery of the Phase One scoping exercises in 2017/18, a much smaller sum at the earliest stage of project development⁷. These are grants, not savings, and they tell you the scale of the experiment rather than its result.

Estimated benefit is larger and less certain. The £19.5 billion figure for the smart meter rollout covers 2013 to 2034 and is stated in 2011 prices⁴. The £40 billion figure for flexibility savings is described as being over the coming decades and was published in 2017⁵. Both are modelled estimates, not measured outcomes, and the dates and price bases differ, so they are not directly comparable.

Participation figures come from consumer research rather than from the trials themselves. In a survey covering 19 August to 17 September 2021, 51% of those with smart meters said they monitored their energy use, and 41% of those with smart meters held a time-of-use tariff or smart appliances, against 17% among the total sample⁸. In Q2 2021, around half (52%) of consumers said they had a smart meter⁹. A separate 2015 consultation recorded that nearly eight in ten (79%) consumers with a smart meter had taken steps to try and use less energy¹⁰.

The gap between intention and measurement is exactly what the trials existed to close. Saying you have taken steps is not the same as a measured reduction, and the SENS evaluation was designed to test products against savings in excess of those already identified in the impact assessment¹.

What drives participation and results

Three things drive whether a household gets anything out of a trial: whether the feedback is useful, whether the household is equipped to act on it, and whether anyone is watching out for the households least able to take part.

On the first, the SENS objectives are explicit that solutions had to be attractive and valued by consumers and easily available, using existing technologies and delivery channels or cost-effective new hardware¹. A product that requires new hardware and a new habit is a harder sell than one that works through a channel the household already uses.

On the second, the equipment base is the constraint. Smart Energy GB, a company funded by mandatory contributions from energy suppliers, has a duty to ensure consumers in vulnerable circumstances are not 'left behind' and has a specific team focused on vulnerable consumers, working with partners including Carers UK⁴. That duty exists because participation in anything data-driven is uneven, and the households with the most to gain from lower bills are often the least able to engage with an app or a tariff.

On the third, the wider roll-out provides the platform. The smart metering roll-out in Great Britain creates a new platform for innovation, increasing the level of detail and accuracy of energy consumption data and tariff information². The stated benefit for households is putting them in control of their energy use by helping them to save money¹¹. Trials are how that claim gets tested rather than asserted.

How it differs across the UK nations

The trials and the metering platform beneath them do not cover the UK evenly, and the differences matter to anyone trying to work out what applies where.

Smart meters themselves are a Great Britain programme. Energy suppliers aim to provide every home and business in England, Scotland, and Wales with free smart meters in the next few years¹². The Smart Metering Policy Framework consultation applies to the gas and electricity markets in Great Britain³. Northern Ireland sits outside that framework, and its energy support has historically been handled differently: the Energy Price Guarantee operated, for the most part, in the same way for households across the whole of the UK, with differences for Northern Ireland¹³.

Devolved activity has its own flavour. The Welsh Government funded an easy to access advice service set up to help people improve the energy efficiency and smart performance of their homes and businesses in Wales¹⁴. Its Smart Living Initiative aimed to catalyse opportunities and increase the potential for step change using smart technologies, systems and processes to deliver on future ambitions of what low carbon wellbeing should look like in terms of energy, heat and mobility⁷. The Optimised Retrofit Programme in Wales used funding for the installation of smart technologies so tenants can best control their energy use¹⁴.

Scotland has its own history of microgeneration support and its own enforcement arrangements for energy efficiency in the private rented sector, where local authorities will carry out enforcement and compliance duties¹⁵. Northern Ireland's sustainable energy programme noted as far back as 2009 that heat pumps were undergoing field trials by the Energy Saving Trust, and that if manufacturer's claims were proven the technology would be supported¹⁶.

The investment picture has been uneven for longer than the smart meter programme has existed. A 2019 select committee report identified a profound disparity between the public money invested in residential energy efficiency schemes per capita in England compared to the devolved nations¹⁷. Renewable generation shares also differ: Scotland's annual energy statement in 2019 put the UK figure at 29.3% for the UK as a whole, or 25.6% for the rest of the UK excluding Scotland¹⁸.

The rules that came out of this work

The trials did not sit in a legal vacuum, and several of the rules a household now lives under were shaped by the same period of policy development.

The Smart Energy Code is the document that carries the detailed arrangements. A 2014 consultation confirmed that the detailed arrangements to support the enrolment proposals would be incorporated into the Smart Energy Code¹⁹. Earlier, Stage 1 of the Smart Energy Code consultation closed at 11:45pm on 17 May 2013, with representations due by 14 August 2013²⁰. These dates mark the point at which the technical and commercial rules for smart metering were settled.

For electric vehicles, the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) Regulations 2021 apply to the sale of smart cables sold in Great Britain after 30 June 2022, and they do not apply to smart cables sold before that date²¹. This is the clearest example of a trial-adjacent area becoming hard regulation: smart charging moved from demonstration to mandatory default settings.

The Green Deal, an earlier scheme, was subject to meeting the 'golden rule': that estimated savings on bills should always equal or exceed the cost of the work, and it was to include microgeneration technologies on that basis²². The Energy Efficiency (Private Rented Property) (England and Wales) Regulations 2015 fulfilled a duty in the Energy Act 2011 to implement regulations²³. Both show the same pattern: a scheme tests an idea, and if it survives, it becomes a rule with an enforcement mechanism.

What closed trials mean for energy independence

The honest answer is that a closed trial leaves a household with evidence rather than a service. The products trialled under SENS were tested to see whether they could deliver savings in excess of those already identified in the smart meter impact assessment¹. Where they could, the route to a household is commercial, not experimental.

What the trials did establish is the measurement layer. Without half-hourly data, a household cannot demonstrate that it shifted its use, and no flexibility scheme can verify it. That is why the smart metering roll-out is described as creating a new platform for innovation², and why the benefits estimate of £19.5 billion over 2013 to 2034 rests on the system working as intended⁴.

The dependence that remains is worth stating plainly. A household with a smart meter still buys its electricity and gas from a supplier, still relies on the grid, and still depends on the communications network that carries its meter data. The flexibility savings estimated at up to £40bn over the coming decades are a system-level figure, not a promise to any individual home⁵. Participation in anything built on that data depends on consent, on a working meter, and on the household being able to act on what it sees.

Where the trials helped is in narrowing the gap between what households say and what they do. The 2015 finding that nearly eight in ten (79%) consumers with a smart meter had taken steps to try and use less energy¹⁰ is a statement of intent. The SENS evaluation was designed to test whether products could turn that intent into measured savings¹. That is the useful legacy: a clearer idea of which feedback approaches work, and a metering platform that makes the next round of testing possible.