National Energy Efficiency Data Framework (NEED) user survey: response
Published 23 December 2021
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The 2021 National Energy Efficiency Data Framework (NEED) user survey (published June 2021) asked users of these statistics to provide feedback on their uses of NEED and desired development priorities. We received 17 responses to this survey covering a range of private and public sector users.
The most popular development priorities that users requested were:
1. More timely data reporting
2. Additional household/property characteristics
3. Including more energy efficiency measures (especially heat pumps)
Other development priorities advised by users included:
- better data access
- more temporal granularity
- wider geographical scope
- more one-off analysis to demonstrate the utility and accuracy of the data
The current NEED production process is too labour-intensive to be scaled up to meet these development requests. To do so requires a new production pipeline to acquire, process and disseminate NEED data.
Survey respondents were asked about their prioritisation between publishing NEED as usual in June 2022, or pausing the NEED publication in 2022 to make more time for development. 12 of the 17 respondents (70%) were in favour of pausing NEED in 2022 in order to facilitate development.
A key blocker for BEIS to publish more frequent or timely consumption data is that we currently collect electricity consumption data from many data aggregators. We’re hoping to replace this process by collecting this data from a single source, removing this blocker for more timely data. If successful, we would need to make some fundamental changes to how we process both gas and electricity data and develop appropriate dissemination methods.
In light of the above, we have decided to pause the 2022 NEED publication in order to make time for development work. This development necessarily remains contingent on resourcing levels and we will provide further updates as our work plans progress.
The patterns seen in both the household consumption and impact of energy efficiency measures reported through NEED are relatively stable over time and therefore users can continue to make use of the tables published in June 2021.
BEIS will continue to collect meter point consumption data which forms the subnational gas and electricity publication. The December 2021 subnational gas and electricity consumption publication has been released, incorporating 2020 consumption data. The meter point consumption data which makes up this release will be made available to researchers on the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service.
The subnational gas and electricity consumption publication incorporating 2021 consumption data will be released as planned in December 2022.