How to make sure smart meters truly deliver for consumers

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has put in place a binding obligation for all energy suppliers to roll out smart meters to their remaining non-smart customers by the end of 2025. To achieve this, suppliers must publish their annual targets online, and these are reevaluated each year based on how many customers are yet to have a smart meter installed.

Ensuring that every home has a smart meter will bring benefits for customers, suppliers, and the environment, but to make sure they have a meaningful impact, it is important to understand exactly how these devices benefit consumers, and why they must be fully operational to do so.

How customers really benefit from smart meters

Smart meters are a game-changing technology, but for reasons that are not always fully understood. One of their most cited benefits is that they give customers the opportunity to take control of their consumption by seeing how much energy they use, but this is only part of the picture. While such insights may help guide customers towards buying more efficient devices, people today primarily use energy to prepare food and heat their homes, and are unlikely to change these necessary behaviours in substantial ways.

Smart meters do not only benefit customers by giving them insights into how and when they use energy, but by sharing those insights with suppliers who can then act on their behalf. Remote, half-hourly energy readings from households help suppliers serve customers better by:

• Providing consistently accurate bills to ensure they never overpay for energy.
• Managing supply more effectively to prioritise cheaper and more renewable energy sources whenever possible.
• Offering time-of-use tariffs that allow households to automatically access the best prices at any time.
• Incentivising and facilitating smart devices such as electric heating and vehicles, battery storage, and other home energy management solutions that can be charged or used when electricity is cheaper.
• Identifying and prioritising the requirements of vulnerable customers so they can receive the support they need.

All these benefits take place behind the scenes without any action required from the customer, but only if the meter that has been installed is fully functioning and sending data to the supplier.

To benefit customers, smart meters must work

Installation targets for smart meters are rightly ambitious – they will play an important role in delivering cheaper, cleaner, and more convenient energy for consumers – but it ultimately doesn’t matter how many smart meters are in people's homes if they do not work as intended.

According to research from Citizens Advice, as many as 30% of installed smart meters may not be working properly, and data from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has found that at the end of last year 3.98m meters in Great Britain had temporarily lost the smart functionality that allows them to send data to suppliers.

At E.ON, we had the second most ambitious installation targets of any supplier in the UK, and in 2023 installed the second highest number of units, but we know that installation numbers aren’t everything. No large supplier has been able to meet its targets in full, but what ultimately matters most is how many smart meters in the UK are truly working to benefit customers, and the measures that suppliers are taking to make sure they do.

Why smart meter installation targets are not enough

We know that it’s a false economy to install smart meters and not make sure they function, which is why our Smart Meter Health teams are working to engage with customers, identify issues, and ensure that every smart meter we install delivers its intended benefits.

We have been given access to industry data placing us among the best suppliers for keeping customers’ smart meters working, but there is still work to do. While we are committed to meeting our targets, we believe that any future decisions by suppliers, regulators, or government should not only consider quantity when it comes to rolling out smart meters, but quality.