The chief executive of Utilita has urged the government to discount almost 4 million ‘dumb’ meters from its official smart meter rollout statistics.
Bill Bullen told Utility Week that the current rollout targets mean there is an unintended incentive for suppliers to install meters in ‘dumb mode’.
Bullen said that counting dumb meters in the official figures incentivises installers to “screw a meter on the wall and then just walk away”, without commissioning them onto the Data Communication Company’s (DCC) network which allows them to operate in smart mode.
There could be a number of reasons why a meter is not commissioned, including the length of time it takes to commission a meter. If for example a smart meter engineer makes multiple failed attempts to commission a meter due to issues with the network, they may decide to leave the installation as is and move on to other installation appointments.
Bullen said: “Smart meter installations have got to be fully commissioned because otherwise you are creating a problem that someone else at some point has got to come along and clear up.
“One of the problems of having targets is that people do end up running around quickly screwing a meter on the wall. If you don’t say it has got to be commissioned, then the incentive on the supplier is to get as many meters installed as they possibly can and to not bother about commissioning them.
“I think it’s possibly because government wants to count every smart meter that has been installed to make the numbers look good. But you end up in a situation where actually you’ve created an incentive to have smart meters installed in dumb mode.”
It comes as the government’s latest figures reveal that at the end of 2023 there were 34.8 million smart and advanced meters in Great Britain in homes and small businesses.
Yet almost 4 million smart meters are in ‘dumb’ mode, meaning they operate in the same way as a traditional energy meter would.
The government has adjusted its target installation levels for smart meters from all homes and small businesses in 2019, to its current target of 74.5% of homes and nearly 69% of small businesses to have smart meters by the end of 2025.
Responding to Bullen’s comments, a Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said energy suppliers are required to keep their customers’ meters working, that Ofgem is responsible for regulating them against this requirement and that “the vast majority of meters are working in smart mode”.
“We want as many consumers as possible to benefit from smart meters helping them to manage their energy use and save money on their energy bills. Lord Callanan has written to Ofgem, urging action to ensure suppliers are held to account if they are not supporting customers with issues as they should be,” they added.
Meanwhile, Bullen also took aim at the DCC’s network, which he has previously criticised as “clearly not up to scratch”.
He particularly took issue with the number of outages the system faces for scheduled maintenance, meaning prepay energy customers sometimes have difficulties topping up their meter.
Ultimately, Bullen believes the DCC needs to be “a 24/7 service”.
He added: “What we have at the moment is a DCC that doesn’t have any obligation to provide a 24/7 service.
“In fact, it can shut down its systems at 8 o’clock on one day and not start them up again until 8 o’clock the following morning or something ridiculous.
“Then they talk about uptime excluding all of that scheduled maintenance. So they’ll publish a figure saying, ‘well, we are 99% available’. What they mean is they’re 99% available in the periods where they’re trying to be available, there’s massive periods where they’re not trying to be available.”
In response, a DCC spokesperson said: “We regularly upgrade our system to provide a robust and stable service that meets the needs of our customers and energy consumers.
“The network operates 24/7, 365 days a year (within regulatory parameters for planned maintenance) and all core system changes not included in allowed downtime are implemented out of hours to minimise any impact for DCC customers and energy consumers.”
Earlier this week figures from Electralink revealed that the smart meter rollout took an “unexpected downwards turn” in March.
In total, there were 185,000 smart electricity meter installations last month – the lowest number of installations during March since 2020.
This figure is 9% less than the month before and 13% less than March 2023. The same month in 2021 and 2022 had 224,000 and 219,000 installations respectively.