Utility Week

30 | FEBRUARY 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Analysis The smart meter rollout: Where are we now? The end of 2020 should also have heralded the completion of the smart meter rollout. Adam John examines what progress had been made by this one-time milestone, and what more needs to be done. M ore than 22 million smart and advanced meters have been installed in the UK according to government figures, putting the sector 30 million devices short of reaching its target to install the technology into every UK home. In 2019, government announced a four year extension to the original 2020 end date for the smart meter programme, acknowl- edging what industry leaders had long said about the impossibility of delivering within the timescale thanks to a litany of techni- cal and operational challenges. The new deadline was then moved back a further six months because of the pandemic. Here, we gauge the views of industry experts on the missed deadline and whether the 2025 goal may suffer the same fate. Matthew Roderick, founder and chief executive, n3rgy Roderick previously spent five years at the Data Com- munications Company (DCC) as its chief technol- ogy/innovation officer. He believes the sector under- stood several years ago that the technologi- cal complexities of the rollout would mean that 2020 was "maybe impossible". He says: "There was always an enormous mountain to climb to achieve 2020. Within the first few years it started to become quite clear that that would be an incredibly chal- lenging target. My involvement was just getting the basic system to work, the com- plexities involved getting into around 30 mil- lion homes and installing those meters were yet to come. By 2016/17, in many people's minds, 2020 was an extremely challenging, maybe impossible target." Roderick adds that in his view, the sector can "comfortably" get to around 75-85 per cent by mid-2025 but there will be a "long tail" of difficult properties that will go way beyond this date. "The purpose of the rollout is to get clearer energy bills for the population and to start measuring, and ultimately discour- aging, the generation of carbon. An 80-90 per cent smart meter coverage is an excel- lent start to set this on track for the various regional and national programmes for decar- bonisation and net zero," he adds. Doug Stewart, chief executive, Green Energy UK For Stewart, the rollout would have been bet- ter handled by network companies as opposed to retailers. He says: "What we have is a programme that was poorly thought out, poorly executed, and erroneously promoted to the public. It was always ambitious. "But it was given to suppliers to imple- ment, when giving the role to distribu- tion companies would have allowed for a regional street-by-street rollout, the data would have been collected by the people who had the most efficiency gains to harvest from the information smart meters could collect, and the need for a fragmented and diverse meter installation programme would have been avoided." He adds: "If the smart meter programme had been devised on the basis of coopera- tion and how it would deliver the objectives as seamlessly as a possible, rather than from a government position of distrust of the 7 9 11 10 11 9 11 5 76 73 75 73 74 80 72 80 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 Q4 2018 Q1 2019 Q2 2019 Q3 2019 Q4 2019 Q1 2020 Q2 2020 Q3 2020 Satisfied Dissatisfied Record level of satisfaction with smart meters More than 70 per cent of consumers say they are satisfied with their smart meter, the highest level recorded, Ofgem's latest consumer perception survey has found. The energy regulator's quarterly survey, commissioned jointly with Citizens Advice, polled more than 3,200 domestic consumers in Q3 2020. In total, 71 per cent said they were satisfied with their smart meter. Previously, between Q1 2019 and Q2 2020 the number of people satisfied remained consistently between 64-67 per cent. There was also a significant increase in satisfaction of the smart meter installation process from 72 per cent in Q2 to 80 per cent – matching the record high set in Q1 2020. Customers with a smart meter were more likely to be satisfied overall with their supplier's customer service (74 per cent) than those without (71 per cent). There was an increase in satsfacton of the smart meter installaton process from Q2 2020 (72%) to Q3 2020 (80%) Satisfaction with smart meter installation over time

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