Pipe up: suppliers and the smart meter rollout

“Suppliers are expected to ‘learn on the job’ when installing smart meters while working to tight schedules.”

The UK energy industry is faced with deploying 53 million smart meters in a programme that will cost more than the London Olympics.

In this environment, all players are beholden to find ways of limiting cost and risk, and a key way of doing this is by sharing knowledge, not just internally, but among market participants.

Any form of knowledge sharing raises legitimate concerns around data protection and commercial confidentiality. However, when properly managed, it can generate major benefits for companies and customers.

One of the criticisms levelled against a supplier-led rollout of smart meters is that individual suppliers are installing meters on streets where they might have little or no operational experience. Problems such as a lack of local knowledge of where the existing meter is located will inevitably lead to protracted installations, re-visits and higher costs.

Suppliers are expected to “learn on the job” while working to tight schedules and keeping customer inconvenience to a minimum. Smaller suppliers in particular will be challenged in their deployment of smart meters by the variety of housing stock and variations of existing meter installations.

Would it not make more sense for existing market data and the installation experience, reported by all suppliers, to be made available to the teams charged with rolling out smart meters to 30 million homes over the next five years? Such intelligence would facilitate better supplier decision making and would provide the energy industry as a whole with the opportunity to demonstrate how collaboration can reduce costs and improve the consumer experience.

ElectraLink is working with the Energy Saving Trust to create a data universe of relevant information that covers every home in Britain. This uses advanced data analytics to predict property level information, such as the meter location or the likelihood of asbestos, which can be used by the installers of smart meters to improve the speed and efficiency of deployment.

This predictive tool allows market data and installation experience to be shared across the energy industry. An industry of individual players charged with implementing a huge national infrastructure programme, while suffering from critical gaps in their knowledge, can only be perceived negatively. Collaboration on this level benefits everyone.