Claire Rowland, Senior Manager for the Living Lab and Whole Energy Systems Accelerator at Energy Systems Catapult, examines why Britain’s increasingly smart homes are creating a new set of challenges for clean energy innovators and why testing technology in the real world matters.
More than 60,000 MCS-certified heat pumps were installed during 2025, the highest annual figure on record. Rooftop solar also passed its previous installation record. Meanwhile, battery electric vehicles have accounted for around a quarter of new UK car registrations so far in 2026.
Government policy is moving in the same direction. Its latest Clean Flexibility Roadmap update includes plans for a new ‘Smart Readiness’ metric on Energy Performance Certificates, assessing a home’s ability to generate energy, optimise consumption and manage energy flexibly.
For clean energy innovators, this illustrates an interesting engineering problem. Their product increasingly won’t be operating alone. Moreover, the combined operation of these technologies can affect demand, flexibility and the wider electricity network, both locally and nationally.
Beyond the test rig
Interoperability is becoming a recognised challenge. The UK’s 2025 Net Zero Technology Outlook identifies the need to make demand-side technologies, the grid and other appliances work together at scale. But interoperability is only one hurdle.
Britain has one of the oldest housing stocks in Europe. A product designed for the home of the future still has to work in the Victorian terrace, the 1930s semi and the poorly insulated rural property of today. Much of the UK’s existing housing stock will still be standing in 2050.
For innovators, commercialisation therefore involves more than proving the technology works. It means proving it can integrate with other products, cope with different buildings and deliver an experience consumers actually want. A test rig alone cannot reveal all of this insight.
Where technology meets the real world
Energy Systems Catapult’s Living Lab includes more than 5,000 UK households. The Lab supports trials of technologies, services, business models and policies, combining technical data with evidence about consumer behaviour. Through our Whole Energy Systems Accelerator (WESA), it can also test interactions with future market and network conditions.
That real-world testing can take many forms. The Living Lab has supported Kestrix in testing its heat-loss survey service, which uses thermal-imaging drones. The Lab has helped companies developing home energy integrations access households with devices from specific manufacturers for testing. It has also been used to test novel flexibility services with EVs and electric heating systems, providing insight into how new technologies and services perform outside controlled conditions.
Across these trials, the goal is not to prove that a technology works, but to understand how it performs in the conditions it will ultimately face, and what needs to change before it can be deployed at scale.
Testing in the homes of the future
Our analysis, published this year, found Living Lab households are around a decade ahead of the wider population in adopting individual low-carbon technologies, with more than half already having multiple technologies installed.
For a company approaching commercialisation, that offers an important head start. Testing in these homes can expose integration or usability problems before launch. Also, as more homes adopt multiple low-carbon technologies, these conditions will become less exceptional. Testing in them now can help innovators build products for the housing market we can expect in the years to come.
Building a better battery, heat pump or EV charger is only the first test. Commercial success will increasingly depend on how that technology performs alongside everything else in the home. Finding those problems before launch could make all the difference.
Learn more https://es.catapult.org.uk/
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