Mandating landlords to install smart meters in the properties they manage could help the UK reach its smart meter target, an energy chief has suggested.
Philippe Commaret, managing director of EDF Energy’s retail business, was speaking on the first day of Utility Week’s Customer Summit on Wednesday (16 March) and talked about the issues facing the smart meter rollout.
Commaret said there had been a lot of negativity about the rollout in the national press, with stories about the devices being unable to communicate properly.
“The rollout of smart meters is tricky. In the press, we face a lot of difficulties and we believe that there is a way to make smart meters much more accessible,” he said.
He continued: “As an example, when houses are being rented, it could be mandatory to have a smart meter installed in those households and so increase the accessibility for people who are renting these premises to have a smart meter and to have access to the technology that sits behind them.”
According to recently released figures by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), smart and advanced meters made up 50% of all operational energy meters by the end of 2021 – a seven percentage point increase from a year before.
During a panel session, Commaret was asked about communicating the benefits of the devices more effectively. The retail boss, who came to the UK after working in France as EDF’s director of sales, expressed some of his concerns about how the UK’s rollout has fared compared to that of France.
He said: “My biggest struggle when I came to the UK two years ago was to understand why: why the problem of smart metering is a big failure, why the cost of rolling out half of the smart meters that we need to roll out is three times higher than to roll out smart meters in France?”
“Why such a problem, such a waste of money, a waste of time for implementing infrastructure which is so important?”, he asked.
Commaret said while the vast majority of EDF’s installed smart meters are working properly, a significant portion (7%) are not.
He continued: “We have to address this question of communication obviously, but we first have to fix the question of why those smart meters are not working.
“We have to address also the question of the cost for that and we need support. We need to change gear in the smart metering rollout because we are the only country in fact where the customer will decide if they want a meter to be installed.”
Also on the panel was Eon Energy boss Michael Lewis who said the rollout had been a source of “immense frustration”.
He said: “Why is it so expensive in the UK compared to other countries? The original sin was it was given to retailers and not the network companies way back nearly two decades ago. But once you went down the route of saying it’s up to retailers, for the right reason that we wanted to engage customers, then you have to do it properly and you have to make the underlying systems work.”
Lewis described some of the challenges the rollout has faced, including the failure of a large number of first-generation SMETS1 devices to work properly. He said the complications had been “grist to the mill of the Daily Mail” which he said wanted “any story that was negative about smart meters”.
“The good news is we are actually through a lot of that, and we are now in a position where we are rolling out SMETS2 meters at scale. The overwhelming message from customers is very, very positive when we install the smart meter. So I think we are over that hump of negativity,” he added.