Energy Performance Certificates
Our venture into EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) exploration started when we joined Icebreaker One's Project Cygnus initiative in their endeavour to enable sustainable economic recovery from the COVID19 pandemic through data. To drive this goal, we decided to have a look at Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) and housing retrofit potential. We made this decision since EPC data covers dwellings’ energy efficiency and cost potentials, and a large subset of it (at least for England and Wales) is openly available.
In our exploration we managed to come up with a range of observations and suggestions that we have published on this page. In true ODI Leeds fashion we documented our journey through a few consecutive blog posts and GitHub uploads rather than rigid reports. But of course this journey isn’t over yet. We are always looking for ways to improve our work and come up with new and useful tools. So we would love to hear from you if you have any questions, ideas or feedback!
The Story
A series of blogs we've written along the way, documenting what we have found, what we have done, and what we might do next.
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1. Project Cygnus - exploring energy efficiency in housing
An introductory blog post launching our work with Project Cygnus and planning out what we might do.
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2. Old House, cold house?
Exploring whether we could link property age data to energy efficiency data.
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3. Energy (under)Performance Certificates
An extensive blog exploring the data quality issues with EPC data, and how we attempted to 'clean' the data.
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4. EPC you later!
A complete summary of what we did with the data - through from cleaning the data, exploring the errors in the data, and the small pieces of analysis we were able to perform. We also talk about future potentials.
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5. Lessons Learned
A review of all we've done so far - the work we've done, the friends we've made, the challenges we've faced; and also what could come next.
Analysis
We did most of our exploration and analysis in Jupyter Notebooks, allowing us to easily publish our code openly on the web. You can view our code and outputs below, and the raw files can be downloaded from our GitHub repo.
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Data Exploration
An initial exploration of EPC data, looking at data for Leeds only.
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Data Cleaning
A notebook to clean the EPC data as much as possible.
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Property Age Analysis
Looking at property age data linked with the cleaned EPC data for Leeds.
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Heating Types & Green Deal Analysis
Analysing the types of heating for properties, and also the effect of the government's Green Deal scheme.
More about Icebreaker One
Icebreaker One is exploring how to rapidly evolve our financial and energy systems to embed net-zero into all investment in a manner that is demonstrable, provable and uses data to hold organisations to account. Its flagship projects include: Project Cygnus, Open Energy and SERI.
Project Cygnus is looking at how 'economic recovery' money can be directed to net-zero. Open Energy is looking at how we can share information across the entire energy grid to keep the lights on and drive towards net-zero. SERI is looking at how insurance can be a lever of change by ensuring that things like net-zero solutions can actually be protected (e.g. some insurers won't insure EV) and drive change so that net-destructive industries are no longer viable.
Icebreaker One is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation funded by EIT Climate-KIC, Innovate UK as part of UK Research and Innovation (SBRI) and private sector members.
