Onzo and SEE reveal plan for smart heat meters

Smart meters capable of measuring and managing a building's electricity use in real time are becoming increasingly common, but to date there has been little progress in the development of smart devices for managing the use of heat.

That looks set to change after smart meter developer Onzo and energy giant Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) yesterday revealed they are working on a project to apply smart meter functionality to domestic hot water and heating systems.

The partners said they have secured a £795,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board to help fund the project, dubbed Heating and Hot Water Control over the Smart Meter Infrastructure or HAWCS.

The initiative, which is being led by SSE, will aim to replicate smart meter functionality for domestic boilers, allowing households to track how much heat energy they are using, set energy preferences using an online portal and automatically adjust heating or water settings in response to the home's changing energy requirements.

Alistair Phillips-Davies, energy supply director at SSE, said the technology had the potential to cut domestic carbon emissions on a far larger scale than conventional smart meters.

"Up to 75 per cent of a home's energy consumption is attributed to heating and hot water, so improved control of domestic boilers is paramount to increasing household energy efficiency," he said. "This project will provide homeowners with an economical and convenient way to take control of this cost, simply by using a smartphone or logging on to the internet."

His comments were echoed by Joel Hagan, chief executive at Onzo, who predicted that the infrastructure required to support a smart meter network will enable numerous other green technologies.

"With the government pushing for an accelerated rollout of smart metering in the UK, the next logical step is to seek benefits from the communications infrastructure that will be implemented," he said. "Project HAWCS will help to maximise this potential, making space and water heating more efficient and helping utilities to manage demand on their generation and network capacity."

Alongside the HAWCS initiative, Onzo and SSE are working together with seven other firms on a separate, £2.3m research initiative known as Project Hydra, which is similarly investigating how the underlying smart meter communications network could support a range of other services such as healthcare technologies.

The two companies are also poised to launch a new smart meter-based "energy kit" later this month, which is expected to be made available to some SSE customers and will provide them with real-time data on their energy use.