
Who should control EV charging?
60,000 electric vehicles were bought in UK last year. We interviewed electric car drivers to see what they thought about letting energy suppliers control their charging.
Discover what people really value with bespoke research
Build appealing propositions with our experienced players
Discover how consumers use your product or service
Harness innovation to reduce vulnerability to fuel poverty and design smarter consumer protection
UX/UI excellence from a team of proven heavyweights
See beyond what people say to understand what they do in smart homes around the UK

60,000 electric vehicles were bought in UK last year. We interviewed electric car drivers to see what they thought about letting energy suppliers control their charging.

How to articulate what the key value of your product and services? We ran a 1 day workshop to refine language around a groundbreaking new proposition

We use 80% of our energy at home for heating and hot water. This produces 20% of our carbon emissions. We need to give people the heat they want without the carbon. So, back in 2013, we built a team of leading academics and consultants to understand how people use heat at home.

We collaborated with Bristol Energy to launch the UK’s first ever Heat Plan. Heat Plans allow people to pay for heating in ‘Warm Hours’ instead of traditional kilowatt hours.

There’s growing interest in the idea that businesses could sell energy as a service. Confident we could sell Heat as a Service, we wanted to explore how to add Hot Water. We used a Design Sprint to see how far we could get in three days.

As renewable energy generation grows, matching available electricity supply to consumers’ demands gets harder.
We looked at how Electric vehicles could help to balance the grid by testing DSR with domestic EV users. Can this fit into people’s lives? Or will they reject it if it takes away their control?

Find out how people use your product or service so you can improve it. Use simple things, like diaries, to record their everyday experiences using your product.

If we are to reach net zero carbon emissions, businesses will have to play their part.
We set out to understand what businesses are trying to achieve through energy management and what their key needs are to determine what an energy management solution might look like and how demand-side response (DSR) could be part of this solution.

Soft launch your product or service to check it works before opening your gates to the public. Includes 100 highly instrumented homes and a suite of modelling tools.

Get rapid, cost-effective consumer feedback on your product, service or policy idea. Home Truths® is the Catapult’s online panel of 000’s of UK households.

We’ve done various studies to understand how life shapes energy use. We use sensors to see beyond what people say to what they do, and models to relate behaviour to energy use.

We gathered the best in the industry to run a 1-day bootcamp-style hackathon where this super-team developed a free open-source tool to score and publicly test solutions to UK fuel poverty.
Millions of households live with illnesses made worse by the cold. What if you could prescribe a warm home to them? We thought we’d try this out by prototyping a smart energy service for households suffering from a cold-related chronic illness.

We can take responsibility for the entire design development cycle and build you a winning digital experience that is consumer-proven, technically robust and developer-ready.

We conducted a bespoke four-day design sprint with Big Clean Switch to help them design, build and test a digital platform that allows energy customers to make informed choices about their home energy improvements.
We succeed when you succeed: leverage our unique position
We are helping shape the policy landscape for the next 25 years
Matchmakers for government and entrepreneurs
Use Catapult modelling tools to validate propositions across the wider energy system
We collaborate with innovators to deliver projects that move towards decarbonisation goals
The Energy Systems Catapult is a not-for-profit set up by government to help the energy sector innovate. PeopleLab is home to our Consumer Insight team.
Find out more about the rest of the Catapult here then get us involved.
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Birmingham B4 6BS8
We love small print. Said nobody, ever.