New policy position paper highlights ‘transformative’ smart meter potential

The paper will go to Government and key industry stakeholders for consultation and feedback. It will then be reviewed and refined to ensure it is robust, evidence-based, and aligned with the needs and priorities of the housing sector.

With around 23 million smart metered homes and small business connected through a single, secure national network, Britain is already positioned for large scale environmental sensing – and the University of Salford is at the forefront of driving change in this area. 

Co-authored by Salford’s Smart Meters > Smart Homes Lab Head alongside the Smart Data Communications Company’s Policy & Innovation team, the proposed Smart Meter Enabled Environmental Sensing approach shows how Britain’s infrastructure deliver consistent, trusted indoor environmental data across millions of properties.

This impact could be transformative – reliable monitoring of temperature and humidity can strengthen public health interventions, support regulation, and provide a robust evidence base for assessing in-use performance across the built environment, as well as highlighting any issues with housing stock.

Dr Ioannis Paraskevas, Head of the Smart Meters > Smart Homes Lab at the University of Salford, said: “We now have a real opportunity to go further and unlock the value of Britain’s already advanced and secure smart metering infrastructure beyond energy and billing.

“By enabling large scale environmental sensing, we can support better outcomes for residents, provide robust evidence for policy and retrofit, and do so using infrastructure that already exists and has been funded by the public.”

Co-authored with the Smart DCC, the organisation responsible for Great Britain’s smart metering infrastructure, the paper sets out a practical path forward. It explores how indoor temperature and humidity data can be accessed through a centralised platform, at scale, at reasonable cost, and without reliance on domestic Wi-Fi.

Also highlighting the risk of standing still, the policy paper explores how without a coordinated approach, fragmented and duplicated solutions are likely to proliferate – which could risk significantly higher costs, limited scalability, and poor interoperability across the sector.

Demonstrating the power of combining existing national infrastructure with academic and industry expertise, this policy position paper aims to assist in delivering scalable, high-impact solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing the built environment. 

Through these methods, the approach unlocks new opportunities to support health, safety and property management, while strengthening the in-use performance assessment of buildings across the built environment sector.