The DCC’s operations director Dave Broady said there is “no doubt” the first version will be ready for April, but the network may require “two or three additional releases” post going live in April 2016 before suppliers and other users will be able to use it fully.
Broady said the DCC entered a period of systems integration testing at the beginning of September on schedule, with the first message being sent and received successfully through the system architecture last week.
“It’s early days yet of course but the snapshot of how many tests we have done and the success of their tests is very encouraging, it’s a good completion rate.
“This is a point for celebration for us, a lot of hard work to get us to that.”
Broady said ‘intense’ work is currently being undertaken on building a plan on to remove the most important Issue Resolution Protocols IRPs in the messaging code, “ideally” before users on-board in August 2016.
“It’s absolutely the right thing that we have a baseline driving the system integration beginning with all the interoperability issues to get us to that baseline. There are some defects in the code, the messaging protocol for the messaging in the system. It has to be absolutely flawless if we are going to get all the functionality.”
Last week the DCC told the Competition and Markets Authority that prioritising prepayment meters in the smart meter rollout, as recommended in the CMA’s remedies, would delay the programme by bringing IRPs currently scheduled in the later releases to the fore.
Broady said: “That planning process has been going in conjunction with users, the DCC cannot impose that plan, it has to be done in consultation with the Department of Energy and Climate Change and industry, but we are absolutely, if it’s humanly possible, going to try and drive those sub-releases out before August next year to get users on-board.”
The sub-releases will increase testing overheads, but “we think this is the best way to deal with the IRPs” Broady said.
“We need people to get behind that release strategy if and when it’s worked through. It should be done in the next three or four weeks.”
Decc’s smart metering implementation programme’s head of business design assurance Seamus Gallagher said the government was “confident” that the six months contingency already built into the rollout will be adequate, but that the government, with industry, will decide what DCC’s release strategy will mean for the rollout in five or six weeks’ time.