Misinformation and myths surrounding smart meters are hindering the rollout, Eon Energy’s head of transformation has said.
Following the introduction of social distancing measures earlier in the year, the smart meter rollout suffered from decreased installations as engineers were banned from installing the devices in all but emergency situations.
Yet in addition to physical constraints, Eon has spoken about the efforts it has to put in in order to myth-bust misinformation spread on social media.
During the Smarter approaches to smart metering panel session at Utility Week Live Online (UWLO) last week Simon Duncan discussed the operational challenges his company is facing during the rollout, including combatting fake news.
He said: “There were some absurd examples from newspapers, for example suggesting that burglars could use your smart meter to see when you are not at home. It always seemed ludicrous to me, that burglars had gone from peeking through someone’s window to hacking into systems to see if you were at home. They might have been giving the average burglar too much credit.
“As ludicrous stories like that landed we’d have an immediate impact to cancellations and new bookings so we had to be quick on our feet and get information out to advisors and technicians as soon as possible. We had news alerts sent to our people with objection handling techniques and myth busting cards to counteract those stories.
“Speed of course is always critical in these cases, just one opinion or example was enough to print a newspaper story. A good PR team was needed to refute fake stories.”
As an example, Duncan explained that in one such incident a video posted on social media appeared to show a device detecting radioactive waves from one of Eon’s meters.
“It was of course absolute nonsense to anyone in the industry and was quite clearly a child’s toy but the video had over a million views and thousands of comments from people who thought it was real before it was taken down a couple of hours later.”
According to the latest figures more than 22 million smart and advanced meters were operating in the UK at the end of September, with 4 million operating in ‘dumb’ or traditional mode. Meanwhile, the Data Communications Company (DCC) has recently announced that 6 million second-generation SMETS2 devices are now on its network.