Smart Meters for Solihull Schools and Corporate Buildings

Lead Organisation

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council

Overview

Since 2010 Solihull Council’s Property Services team has installed smart meters in schools. With access to smart metering data, schools can understand their energy consumption. This has allowed school management teams to monitor this consumption and identify main areas of waste. The data has also been used to drive pupil’s engagement and behaviour change. Lesson plans have been created to teach children the impact of energy and in most schools, the pupils take charge, monitoring usage, identifying waste, and implementing energy saving actions. Click here to view the Public sector meter guide. Click here to an introductory guide to smart meters for the public sector.

Aims

The Council’s aim in installing smart meters was to provide school bursars, staff, and pupils with insight into their school’s energy consumption and the tools to monitor and manage it more accurately, eliminate waste, reduce costs, and encourage behaviour change. Beyond this, the team sought to embed energy awareness and management skills in the hearts and minds of school children. The function of any meter is to measure consumption. Smart meters do a lot more than this. Below are some of the goals the team wanted to achieve through the installation of smart meters:

• Use smart meters to identify unusual high consumption levels, highlighting energy wastage.
• Identify energy saving opportunities and allow sites to monitor the effect of any energy saving measures that were introduced because of understanding and analysing their energy profiles.
• Have access to consumption data allowing each site to measure, record and analyse energy consumption data.
• Record electric and gas consumption on site across their portfolio every half an hour, and have it displayed on a portal for the customer to download, view graphically and use in lessons.
• Give managers confidence in their financial position with regards to energy through using smart meters to provide a basis for predicting future consumption and costs based on past accurate consumption data, as well as ensuring all energy bills were based on actual reads and consumption data.
• Install gas and electric smart meters into all corporate and educational properties within an 18-month period.

• The installation of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) was a challenge as there were a lot of meters that required AMRs to be installed. It took nine months to install gas and electric AMR units to properties.
• The project required one dedicated Council member of staff to co-ordinate works. In addition, there was a lot of background administrative paperwork that needed to be pulled together for installation to go ahead. This included providing a list of all sites addresses and postcodes and locations of all gas and electric meters along with meter location drawings for all sites.
• The smart meter provider needed to visit each site initially and check all gas meter installations, take photos and report back to the Council with concerns. All these visits needed to be co-ordinated, the Council had to confirm all contact details were correct and provide our supplier with the updated site name and address, contact name and numbers for each site so the smart meter provider could easily contact site and book in their visits.

• During the installation period the Council would receive a daily update report that provided the status for each electric and gas meter installed, it showed the team when each site was due for installation and if this had been done. The report gave the team confidence that work was on track and identified problem installations that may need an input from the authority.
• The dedicated Council member of staff worked very closely with the smart meter provider every day during the install process. The Council would also receive a weekly “issue log” containing a list of queries that had to be resolved. These queries were overcome by regular communications with the smart meter provider throughout the course of installation.

Outcomes

All the aims for the project have been met and results show that the use of smart meter data has led to behaviour change resulting in financial and energy savings. Installing smart meters enabled the team to:

• Link to Suppliers Billing
• Gain confidence that bills were accurate
• Eliminating estimates
• Measure, record and analyse energy consumption information
• Identify unusually high consumption profiles
• Highlight energy waste and encourage action
• Monitor the effect of energy saving measures
• Use data for supporting behavioural change
• Use data for other services i.e. Display Energy Certificates

Schools on average can see savings of up to 20% through monitoring actual smart meter data as well as helping to contribute to net zero aims. One Solihull Junior School saved £6,795 – 25% saving on their energy bill by:

• Establishing an Eco Team and involving pupils in energy walk arounds and awareness in the school – Using their Smart Meters to identify waste and review results.
• Implementing “Switch Off Fortnight” – Eco Team implementing active labelling of lights and IT equipment – Eco Team posters and awards.

In the Future

• All the sites and schools were trained in how to log into the energy portal and more importantly how to interpret the energy graphs, ensuring the sites understood what they were looking for on the energy profile graphs – high consumption or general anomalies. This has worked well as it has given everyone involved a good understanding of how to take their energy consumption into their own hands.

•  Working with and teaching the children about the energy profiles and getting them to examine their energy consumption in school and reduce it through behaviour change.
• “Switch off fortnight” – where schools used their AMR data to monitor and demonstrate what they saved was particularly successful.
• Getting the students at schools involved has led to behaviour change and has taught them how they can take the lead in saving energy and money and act as eco champions.
• Adapting AMR reports to make them more simplistic specifically for children, worked well as it made things easier for the students to understand. One example equates kilowatt hours to the number of iPads in use.

• AMR loggers have been installed in most of our corporate and educational buildings within Solihull and as a result the team have a huge amount of data and experience in its analysis and implication of remedial opportunities.

The team have done many programmes on energy behaviour change using AMR data over the years.  Next steps for work with smart meters: Loading key school building metrics for further intelligent insights:

• M2 to enable comparison of bigger and smaller sites ‘like for like’ and benchmark them against each other.
• Occupancy overlaying the times when schools are in or out of the building to find easily avoidable waste.

The Extras

• In November 2021, the Property Services team was invited to speak at the Schools and Academies Show, supporting the Department for Education (DfE), and the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), to present their innovative work with smart meters in schools.
• Following on from attendance at the Schools and Academies Show, the hard work of the team has been used as a case study by BEIS in their new Public Sector Smart Meter Guide. Their work has been used as an example to help public sector organisations better understand how they can benefit from smart meters and use them as part of their own journeys to net zero carbon emissions.
• Case study on the Stark (smart meter provider) web page
• Mentioned in the government smart meter guide

For further information on the project or to work with us in one of a variety of ways, please check out Our Services webpage or contact the SWM team at enquiries@swm.org.uk.