carbon limited

Last year the Energy Technologies Institute launched the £100m  Smart System and Heat Programme, which “aims to design a first of its kind Smart Energy System in the UK.” As part of this programme, they’re doing a £3m piece of research into consumer behaviour on heat networks.

A member of the research team got in touch this week to ask if she could come in for a chat about what behaviour trends we’re seeing at Insite, our metering and billing company that looks after around 7k customers on community heating schemes. She was really nice about it and we began to talk about potential dates for the meeting.

Then, as we talked on the phone, some other details began to emerge. Would ETI agree to show us interim results? No, interim results are typically only reported internally to ETI. What about final results? Well, maybe, it depends on whether the ETI members choose to release the results to the public – but there’s a good chance the results will not be released.

I was stunned. For clarity ETI is 50% funded with public money from BIS, DECC, TSB and EPSRC.

The other 50% funding comes from the private sector, including E.On, EDF, Shell and BP. And apparently these private sector companies get the final word on whether or not the results of this publicly funded research are actually released to the public.

Never mind the fact that they’re not sharing results with the people they’re getting the intelligence from, they may choose not to share it with the public! In which case, the government is doing a fantastic job of funding market intelligence gathering on behalf of private sector companies that certainly don’t deserve their charity.

Help the SMEs! Help small businesses access credit. Give grants for innovation by energy start-ups. But for godssake don’t pay E.On and co £150m to work up a strategy for dominating the community energy market.

The researcher has now rung back to confirm that we can see a 1-2 page executive summary in just over a year. I’ll go ahead with the meeting but rather than an open and frank conversation (which is what it should be) I’ll now be keenly aware of how much she’s sharing in return. And that’s not the way it ought to be.