Energy performance certificates (epc): ratings by output area
Last week the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) released ‘Energy Performance of Buildings Data: England and Wales‘. The portal allows you to access Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) in England and Wales. The data is for ‘households, businesses, researchers and policy makers’ to use according to the website.
Once signed up a link in sent to your email, which signs you into the site. Once on the site, the bulk file for ‘all domestic certificates’ can be downloaded – the download is a .zip file around 3GB in size, and once unzipped is around 25GB.
To aggregate EPC ratings by Ouput Area we were only interested in a few of the variables from the data. These were postcode, current energy rating, actual energy rating, current energy efficiency, actual energy efficiency. The National Statistics Postcode Lookup was used to aggregate each address by Output Area. To aggregate, for ratings, mode was used, for efficiency, median was used. Additional columns of percentage of rating A for current and potential, as well as a count of buildings in each OA were also produced. For where there are more than one reading for the same address, the most recent log was used.
Current energy cert can be viewed on CDRC Maps and the ‘Energy Performance Certificates (EPC): Ratings by Output Area’ data is available to download from CDRC Datasets. The data on CDRC Datasets only uses a few columns from the full data (as described above), so if you are interested in more of the variables please have a look at the original data. Code for the cleaning and aggregation will be on GitHub soon..