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14 | 4TH - 10TH OCTOBER 2019 | UTILITY WEEK T he government has described replacement of all gas and electricity meters with smart meters as an essential national energy infrastructure upgrade for Great Britain that will help make our energy system cheaper, more eff icient and reliable and be a key enabler of the transition to a low carbon economy. Already there are 14.9 million smart and advanced meters operating in homes and businesses across Great Britain, although the transition could hardly be described as seamless. It has been thwarted by missed deadlines, interoperability issues, and installation rates suff ering a loss of momentum as the government commitment to ensuring that every home and small business in the country is off ered one. It's relief all round that the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is now consulting on extending the deadline from 2020 to 2024. Analysis from BEIS suggests that smart meters will slash £300 million off consumers' bills in 2020, rising to more than £1.2 billion a year by 2030 – or £47 per household – though those fi gures have been disputed. For energy providers, applying analytics to the vast quantities of useful data utilities collect from customers can uncover new customer usage patterns, better forecast demand, and improve compliance with regulatory requests, as well as prevent fraud and reduce loss. e majority of meter installations to date have been fi rst generation smart meters (SMETS1), a standard defi ned by government to ensure minimum common functionality ahead of the national smart metering communications infrastructure being in place that will pave the way for interoperability between all energy suppliers. e long- awaited introduction of SMETS2 – the second generation of smart meters – has given a new impetus to the use of smart data. Utility companies will benefi t because, by better understanding how and why their customers use energy, they can off er products and services specifi cally tailored to their customers' needs. is includes dynamic tariff s, localised peer- to-peer energy trading and faster switching times, explains Bjoern Reinke, director, Smart Metering and Systems of Intelligence at Drax, which has worked on smart metering projects with customers including Haven Power and Opus Energy. As we move towards a decentralised energy system, where the production and consumption patterns become hard to predict, the access to data is a key enabler for the transition towards a sustainable future, says Christian Chudoba, founder and chief executive of digital energy platform Lumenaza. Against a backdrop of compelling benefi ts, many energy providers remain tight-lipped on how smart meter data is being used to their competitive advantage. A spokeswoman from SSE told Utility Week the commercially sensitive nature of the subject meant it was unable to share details of how it was using data from the 1.45 million SMETS1 and 250,000 SMETS2 meters currently installed among its customer base. Other utilities approached by Utility Week were similarly reluctant to be interviewed. Although energy providers are in an excellent position to make the most of customer data, in practice most customers aren't noticing any benefi ts, says Mustafa Atik, an energy and utilities expert at customer experience specialist Quadient. Only a quarter of UK consumers believe they have been given a better service or advice thanks to their utility companies' application of their data, while 61 per cent have seen no evidence of it being used at all, according to Quadient's research. With data use such a critical part of the modern customer experience, utility providers risk wasting their eff orts if it brings no customer- facing benefi ts and creates the impression that customers ultimately don't matter, Atik says. Ted Hopcroft, an energy expert at PA Consulting, says availability of the data and knowing what to do with it once you have it remains a stumbling block, not to mention Smart meters form the foundation of the utility sector's digital transformation. But what has the industry learnt about how to use the vast quantities of data at their disposal? Rachel Willcox fi nds out. W h y s m a r t m e t e r s r e m a i n a n u n t a p p e d r e s o u r c e