Interview: Angus Flett, chief executive, Data Communications Company (DCC)

“When you do things on a big, national scale there are challenges – if you digitise a whole nation you have got to get it right.”

The smart meter rollout hasn’t exactly been ­problem-free, but the chief executive of the company responsible for the data communications ­system behind the mammoth task remains upbeat.

“We’re digitising a nation here – the last analogue technology – and we are digitising a nation in a way that will have as profound an effect as smart phones.” So maintains Angus Flett when Utility Week meets him at the Data Communications Company (DCC) headquarters in London.

“It’s very rare in your career that you get the chance to be part of something so profound,” he says.

Having started his working life in the army, Flett is used to throwing himself into challenging environments. He went on to make a name for himself in the world of technology in a range of roles from sales and operations to commercial products.

Flett moved to DCC from Vodafone, where he spent four years as senior vice president for global business products and service.

“I was very happy in Vodafone. I got a knock on the door and someone said do you want to come and run DCC and do smart metering,” Flett explains. He describes it as an epiphany-like moment. “I remember asking in the interview – ‘so, let me get this right, the DCC is a licensed monopoly and we will be at the centre of rolling out and operating smart meters, and we’re allowed to innovate and reuse?’”

The answer was yes, and that settled it: “I thought that’s great, what’s not to like?”

Intent on focusing on the positives, Flett is a firm believer that smart meters are an “essential ingredient in delivering the low-carbon economy that everyone wants”. And, he suggests, as a “platform for innovation”, the network supporting smart meters will help transform the way we consume energy and how we look at energy.

“When you start to think about reuse and applications the opportunities are endless,” Flett ponders as he highlights a visit from NHS researchers looking at energy usage trials for suffers of dementia and Alzheimer’s as just one of the suggestions he has received.

“What I’m so passionate about is we all want to live greener, healthier lives and that’s really part of our ‘why statement’. We want Britain to be more connected – have a smarter grid. Smart metering and smart technology will deliver this and that’s why I’m really excited.”

Flett’s CV also includes Mercury – a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless and “the first competitor to BT” – and eight years in BT wholesale, where he learnt “how to work as a regulated monopoly”.

His experience at BT taught him that if you are the “only shop in town” you need to focus on how you deliver satisfaction for your customers.

“As only BT could do, they said have you ever run a big operation role and I said no, so they said off you go and run customer service,” he laughs.

Flett worked on the rollout of first-generation broadband and got to a point where he “really understood big customer operations”, but he admits “when it goes wrong, boy does it go wrong”.

The national smart meter rollout has been a bumpy ride too, with missed deadlines, interoperability issues and a deceleration of installations just as the 2020 deadline draws ever closer.

But Flett is undeterred. “When you do things on a big, national scale there are challenges – if you digitise a whole nation you have got to get this right. It’s critical national infrastructure and we spend an inordinate amount of time – quite rightly – testing, testing and testing again.

“Power is a commodity and you expect it to be there, so it has to work.”

While some critics have been quick to pass judgement, Flett argues that sometimes people “underestimate the scale” of what the DCC and its customers are doing.

“The SMETS1 programme is arguably one of the largest systems integration programmes running in the UK. We will take millions of meters in millions of homes and upgrade that functionality, cut that over into the DCC and unlock interoperability.”

He adds: “The number of variations in terms of meter types and software is huge – well over 500-plus – and you have got to test each one, uplift each one and make sure each version works with each other. It’s like taking every variant of smart phone and making sure each software variant works and they can all talk to each other, so it’s a big scale.”

Flett also stresses that in the UK we have a “habit” of being overly focused on the negative. “I think as a ­collective ecosystem people are doing really well.”

The latest figures from the DCC (as of 25 June) show that a total of 1,269,609 second-generation (SMETS2) meters are now on the network.

“Next year when we’re well into the migration of SMETS1 there won’t be SMETS1 or SMETS2 – it will just be SMETS.

“All of my customers are busting a gut to get consumers to take smart meters – we work incredibly collaboratively with each other, but again it’s a big scale operation,” he says.

So, with some examples of customers losing smart functionality when they switch supplier and a host of other issues, did we get it wrong going down the SMETS1 route in the first place?

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” Flett replies. “To me, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day I want everyone in the UK to have a smart meter… We are where we are and what’s really important is, we all get one. Every country in the world is doing this.”

That may be the case, but the UK faces unique challenges in terms of reaching certain customers due to its housing stock.

“In China they don’t have dual fuel – it’s just electricity. If you go to Spain or France – again very low percentages of dual fuel homes – hardly any. And most of the meters sit outside the home. In the UK most of our meters sit inside our homes, under the stairs or whatever, and a high percentage are dual fuel.”

Flett has met with several of his counterparts and other smart metering professionals around the world and is keen to learn lessons and drive more of the messaging about the wider benefits of smart meters.

“It was very interesting in Denmark,” he says. “They went distribution-led and at the end of it built a DCC because they said we want this central body to do innovation. It doesn’t matter where you start, it’s where you end.”

After attending a select committee in Denmark and having been “lucky enough” to meet the energy minister – “she is an amazing character” – Flett says he was amazed and impressed to see how passionate they were. “There wasn’t a single bit of disagreement around how smart metering is a critical element in the low-­carbon economy. There were just lots of deeper conversations about renewables and how to improve things.”

Shortly after the one million SMETS2 milestone had been reached, a critic described the rate as a “trickle”.

Is Flett happy with how the rollout of the second-­generation devices is progressing? The proud owner of a SMETS2 device, Flett says he loves having one. “When we had ten, I wanted 100,000, when we had 100,000, I wanted a million, now we’ve got a million I want 10 million. When we get to 10 million, I’ll want 30 million and so on.

“It’s irrelevant. We are geared up to be able to operate at scale and we are geared up to do 30 million-plus. I am pleased at the growth rate, but we are constantly focused on being able to maintain and operate at scale and focused on how we can improve.

“And once we’ve done 30 million, we’ll be looking at what else we can do – how we can reuse this technology, how we can help smart cities and electric vehicles.”

He adds: “Within our network there is a huge opportunity for reuse and the regulatory model is brilliant. If we can facilitate innovation and make money from that, we can give that back to my customers. So, my vision would be – ultimately this can be an amazingly self-funded network and a great power for good.”

The DCC has faced some criticism about the ­technical issues encountered in certain areas of northern ­England and Scotland, which prevented suppliers connecting meters to the network. Flett insists all the early ­technical issues have been fixed and growth rates are now ­comparable with the south.

“There is always going to be what we call ‘no’ spots,” he explains, highlighting that even in the capital there are challenges – one of the biggest challenges is metallised glass in new buildings.

Will we get to the Holy Grail of 100 per cent of homes?

“There are rural places where there is no power, no telecoms, so you could probably question whether you really need a smart meter. But if you have got a telephone copper line into your home, then what I hope is that we will be able to deliver you a smart meter.”

Discussing if there could have been a more joined-up approach to the UK’s transition to smart networks by including telecoms and broadband, Flett describes how the DCC is reusing cellular architecture and rides on the back of 2G.

“But it’s important to remember we are uber-secure. You can’t have the bad people taking down power and that’s why we can’t go anywhere near internet architecture, which is inherently insecure.

“Security is a core element for us. Everything we do has to be very secure, but we do use existing infrastructure where possible.”

And what are some of the challenges being encountered by the DCC’s customers?

“I have the distribution network operators, I have the retailers. I think the challenge for all my customers is the volume of work they will have to do and the scale of what they have to do – depending on who they are.

“When you transform a whole industry, you have to think about what’s going on in the whole collective ecosystem. There are profound changes going on all over the energy market. All of this is really about taking us into that next generation of energy management and utilisation. That puts pressure on the whole industry.”

And Flett isn’t afraid to admit there are areas the DCC itself will need to improve on. “We’ve got to get much better at cost transparency and customer engagement.

“If you are the only shop in town, it’s so important that customers get transparency and can see we are spending their money wisely.”