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Npower has called on industry and government to work together to be as “coherent” as possible in developing smart metering.
The supplier told Utility Week the lack of co-ordination between the three major metering programmes that suppliers are currently simultaneously undertaking is risking customer trust and has resulted in “unforeseen consequences”.
The roll out of the domestic smart meter programme, the Nexus gas system and the move towards half-hourly metering for business customers within a short timeframe has added to the complexity of implementing the “difficult and complicated” schemes, Npower said.
An Npower spokesperson added: “Customers need to feel like they understand all of this, be that business customers or domestic customers and that they know what’s going to happen, and what the division is and how it’s going to all come together and work.”
“As far back as 2005 we were talking to Elexon and the others to do half-hourly metering and so on there and then because we said quite clearly it will take ten years to get it right and done, it’s difficult and complicated.”
“Nothing happened for 8 years, and then we are expected to run through it in two or less and I think that is the fundamental point, these things take time when there are a lot of hands under the bonnet doing lots of different jobs at the same time.”
Npower has already been instrumental in extending the timeframe for one of the schemes. Last week half-hourly metering for business customers was delayed by a year to April 2017 after Npower requested a modification to how sites are migrated to half-hourly settlement.
Npower said it raised the modification as it had concerns an April 2016 deadline would have an “adverse impact on consumers, competition and Balancing and Settlement Code governance.”
The spokesperson said: “There is an awful lot of change, be that smart metering or Green Deal or the Energy Company Obligation or anything else in energy, when you start changing the regulations there are always unforeseen consequences and it’s almost impossible to engineer them out so you need to take time and be as coherent as possible in what your trying to achieve.”
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