Christoph Mazur from Engie was joined by Tobiloba Elusakin from Trilateral Research and Amruta Joshi from the University of Birmingham to discuss the implementation of smart energy systems. Christoph Mazur is Project Lead of Zero Carbon Rugeley, a project to produce an innovative design for a town-wide Smart Local Energy System (SLES) including the former Rugeley Power Station site. This project will demonstrate how carbon emissions and energy costs can be reduced whilst also providing a boost for local regeneration. Dr Amruta Joshi from University of Birmingham specialises in supporting businesses with needs in renewable energy, optimisation of energy storage for different applications, and energy efficiency analysis. Her talk highlights smart energy system implementation strategies for SMEs with exemplar case studies; reemphasising the contribution of SMEs in the UK’s action on climate change and hence, the need to address their challenges. Dr Tobi Elusakin is a Research Analyst within the Applied Research and Innovation (ARI) team at Trilateral. During his talk he discusses the EERA data project that proposed and is implementing a data framework to help assess the impacts of energy efficiency investments by taking into account all the relevant building-stock, energy, environmental and socio-economic data in order to assist local government administrators in assessing and prioritising energy efficiency measures in the modernisation and renovation of buildings.