Two Cambridge, England-based companies—The Technology Partnership (News - Alert) (TTP), a product developer, and Arkessa, a machine-to-machine (M2M) service provider—have been asked to deliver a cost-effective smart home energy monitoring platform suitable for future rollout throughout the United Kingdom, as part of a major research project commissioned by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).

The ETI—a public-private partnership, comprising BP, Caterpillar, EDF, E.ON (News - Alert), Rolls-Royce, Shelland and the U.K. government—launched the £3 million ($4.5 million) study in November 2012 to determine how homeowners nationwide use heat and energy. The research—intended to be scaled up to include thousands of householders—is part of the ETI’s (News - Alert) Smart Systems and Heat (SSH) technology program. The aim of the program is to design, develop and demonstrate.

In the initial stages of the research, TTP has installed sensor network technology in homes to capture objective data on how householders use energy. This builds on the company’s successful experience in creating both standards-based and proprietary license-exempt low-power wireless networks for energy, smart home and smart building systems. M2M connectivity services from Arkessa are being used to provide 3G coverage on commercial cellular networks to a data aggregation platform managed by TTP.

Led by London-based environment consultant PRP and University College London’s Energy Institute, the project is being delivered through a consortium that also includes The Technology Partnership (TTP), Frontier Economics, The Peabody Trust, the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) and Hitachi (News - Alert).

Dr Grant Bourhill, ETI Smart Systems and Heat (SSH) project director, commented, “The demand for heat and energy services in the future has to be understood and we have to find better ways of managing and delivering heat in a cost-effective, clean and secure manner.”

Rebecca Sweeney, ETI project manager, said: “The ETI’s national energy modeling work identifies more efficient use of energy as an immediate development priority for the U.K. This research will ultimately help to identify trends in real mass-market consumer behavior, requirements and profiles in order to help us in our goal to design and communicate an effective smart energy system design for the U.K. market.”

The ETI is focused on the acceleration of the development of affordable, secure and sustainable technologies that will help the U.K. to meet its legally binding 2050 climate change targets.