The energy sector must learn lessons from the smart meter rollout when implementing technical standards for future smart home energy technologies, industry observers have warned.
A recent roundtable hosted by DevicePilot, a service monitoring platform for connected devices, discussed the future of the home energy market, which innovations are set to have the biggest impact and what effect this will have on the UK’s net zero goals.
During the roundtable Pilgrim Beart, DevicePilot’s co-founder and chief executive, was asked about potential barriers that need to be overcome in the transition to smart energy homes.
Beart, who is also a founder of AlertMe, which was bought by Centrica and became Hive, said lessons need to be learned from the way the smart meter rollout has panned out, warning that government standards must not stifle creativity within the market.
He said: “I think something we learned from the smart meter process is that involving government in the process of rolling out technical standards makes it very, very slow. So I’m not a die-hard libertarian but what we’re starting to see is an explosion of innovation and creativity in the market, responding to all the market signals, and that’s incredibly exciting.
“We obviously need the emergence of technical standards and other kinds of standards, to allow everyone to join up the silos, but I think that’s probably best done by multi-part, commercial entities, perhaps supervised by government, rather than government trying to come in and mandate how everything happens.
“I think we’re now into the era of the internet, in terms of how all this stuff’s joining up, and that’s very exciting – and that tends to happen bottom up, not top down.”
Phil Steele, future technology evangelist at Octopus Energy, echoed Beart’s thoughts and said: “Let the innovators innovate, don’t dictate.
“There are so many really interesting businesses creating all sorts of really interesting hardware technology, everything is internet based, and APIs are not rocket science to connect to, and make interesting things happen.”
Meanwhile Jacob Briggs, a consultant at Cornwall Insight, said: “Tying two of them together, I think the transition to smarter energy management will not have been successful if we’ve left half the people behind along the way.
“There is definitely a role for market regulation in doing that, but equally if the transition to smart home energy looks like the SMETS standard for everything then we’ve probably also failed along the way.”
Speaking at the Utility Week Customer Summit last week Steele spoke about how Octopus Energy uses technology, such as its Kraken platform, to create innovative tariffs and encourage consumer behaviour change.
“We are using technology to bring lower and more transparent pricing and develop sustainable energy to customers. It’s the technology that we have developed that is making this possible,” he said.