Testing Millions of UK homes for Energy Leaks in Effort to Achieve Net Zero Goal

British city dwellers may have spotted a strange-looking vehicle driving around their neighborhood earlier this year. It looked just like a Google Street View vehicle, with a camera setup sticking out of the back to scan its surroundings. And like the Google car, it scanned city streets and took photos.

But these modified Teslas do more than just take pictures: they’re equipped with cutting-edge sensors and scanners that can report back the exact dimensions, heat loss, materials, age and state of disrepair of every building they drive over.

The car, equipped with what’s called the Built Environment Scanning System (BESS), has been on a spree to find out just how leaky and dilapidated Britain’s buildings really are. Between March and May, the car scanned thousands of roads and millions of buildings across London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds and South Yorkshire.

Data from BESS vehicles will be combined with thermal images taken by drones and planes in a £4 million government-funded project to build a huge digital database detailing the condition of buildings across the U.K. The aim is to help housing associations, local authorities and other property owners quickly plan renovation projects for hundreds of properties at once, says Ahsan Khan of xRI, the British nonprofit behind the project.

Decarbonising UK buildings is one of the toughest challenges on the journey to net-zero emissions. The UK’s 30 million buildings account for around a third of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, with most of the pollution coming from the use of gas for heating and hot water.

Another problem is that many of the UK’s homes are old and drafty. Retrofitting these homes to make them more energy efficient is crucial, but knowing where to start is a huge challenge, as the age and condition of the buildings varies greatly. “We’re held back as a nation because we don’t really know what we have, where it is in terms of the built environment, and what we can do about it,” says Khan.

Currently, the only means of judging a building’s sustainability is the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), a mandatory document that rates every building on a scale of A to G and gives owners advice on how to improve the rating. But EPCs, which rely on the judgement of in-person assessors, are “expensive, time-consuming and inaccurate”, says Dr. Mike Pitts The project is part-funded by the government body Innovate UK, with other funding coming from the UK Space Agency and the Welsh Government.

For organisations such as housing associations and local authorities who want to renovate hundreds of properties at once, EPCs are of little use – instead they often have to send their own assessors to the properties and plan the works schedule, which is a costly and time-consuming undertaking.

Speeding up renovations

The new database is expected to digitise much of this process. If it works as planned, it will use machine learning to tell councils, for example, how many properties already have double glazing installed, or which homes need top-up cavity-wall insulation. In an instant, it will be able to pinpoint exactly which homes have the space and sunlight to install rooftop solar panels. Crucially, it will calculate projected savings on energy bills and provide return-on-investment information, helping organisations access green finance.

“The xRI project represents a major advance in our understanding of our existing stock,” says Mat Colmer of Innovate UK. “The validated data set will improve and automate the refurbishment process, speeding up the entire refurbishment process.”

About 7.5% of homes in England, Scotland, and Wales have already been scanned, and Khan says the framework is in place to build a beta version of the database, due to be released later this year. For now, xRI is focused on decarbonizing buildings, but the BESS vehicles are collecting data on everything they see, from tree cover to potholes, that could be put to use in the future. “The amount of data is just staggering,” Pitts says.

David Grew Researchers from Britain’s Leeds Beckett University call the project “exciting,” but warn that an in-home inspection is essential before any renovation work begins. “Homes have been tampered with many times, so the same home could be completely different,” he says. “This quick and agile method is great for accelerating progress and momentum, but it can’t and shouldn’t replace a really high-quality inspection before construction begins.”

Kate Simpson A researcher at Nottingham Trent University in the UK says neighbourhood data collected by BESS vehicles could help plan local power grid upgrades and climate resilience projects. But the data needs to be collected carefully, she says. “What’s the minimum amount of data we need to make the right decisions?” she says. “That way we can minimise the environmental impact of storing that data.”