A fantastic resource for local authorities

– Local authority taking part in the Net Zero Living Programme

Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme has launched Local Energy Trackers, providing handy local authority area-wide data to all local authorities in the UK. This allows places to explore and compare their performance in key statistics like renewable generation, the take-up of electric vehicles and the energy performance of homes and buildings.

The trackers bring together and aggregate 33 publicly available datasets including total energy consumption from the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, embedded capacity registers from electricity distribution network operators, and public charging infrastructure from the Department for Transport.

Addressing data barriers

Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme has provided funding and support to nearly 300 businesses and local authorities, to adopt innovations that help their places prosper from the shift to net zero. The focus of the programme has been on understanding and removing the non-technological barriers to the transition.

Using and processing local data to support decision-making was identified as a key barrier that the programme was looking to address. As a result, project partner Regen developed the Local Energy Trackers to share baseline energy and net zero information for all local areas involved in the programme. The aim was to help areas understand their local data and how it compares to other places, as well as to save them time and resources.

Many areas need to process data themselves from government sources or energy networks and turn them into useful statistics. This is usually in response to requests from other parts of the council or as part of regular reporting against energy or climate strategies. The trackers can save valuable time for our local authorities.

The trackers can be used to provide a valuable source of high-level information about our local areas and a useful tool to help local authorities engage internally and externally. They can help generate conversations with residents and communities, including understanding what activities are making the biggest contributions to their area-wide emissions and how they compare with other places.

Coverage across the UK

Following feedback from places involved in the Net Zero Living Programme, the trackers have been produced for all UK local authorities across the UK, unitaries and districts, as well as data for county councils. It is as a free and open data source, sponsored by Innovate UK.

The trackers cover more than 360 local authorities and 21 county councils in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Key data challenges

The process has also highlighted some key data challenges for local areas. These included:

• Complex and changing English council tiers and boundaries
  This created issues in using data to track progress and make year-on-year comparisons.
• Differences in Northern Ireland datasets
  This was a challenge to process into something comparable with other areas.
• Diverse transport datasets
  These were the most difficult to process because of different datasets in each nation and questions on sustainable transport and active travel being posed in different ways in different places.
• Lots of old data
  Of the 33 different datasets used in the tracker, a fifth were more than six years old, creating problems with data lags and date differences.

Further details on information sources, issues and analysis undertaken are included in the trackers’ Data Sources tab.

How to use the tool

The arcGIS platform used is easy to use and access from a web browser – simply select your local authority or a comparator area using the drop-down box. The platform has been designed to be intuitive and is written in plain English to encourage its use by a wide selection of stakeholders.

Innovate UK and Regen are keen to hear your feedback – if you have any suggestions for additional analysis or feedback on the tracker, please get in touch.