Not all customers will have a smart meter by the end of 2020, Ofgem has admitted.
“It is clear that smart meters will need to continue to be installed beyond 2020,” the regulator said in an update on suppliers’ rollout plans. It initially sent back six of the 2019-2020 plans submitted by the thirteen larger energy suppliers who have to roll out meters, saying there were “significant concerns” over delivery. One revised plan is still under discussion.
In 2018 several large suppliers missed their rollout targets by more than 10%, the regulator revealed, but just one paid a penalty: SSE avoided enforcement action with a £700,000 payment in April, admitting slow progress on its gas meter rollout. Among the reasons provided by suppliers for missing their milestones were challenges with customer engagement, third-party contracts, remote upgrades of non- compliant Smets1 meters and the transition from Smets1 to Smets2.
The regulator sounded a warning over rollout progress this year, saying that suppliers should have learned lessons from their previous experience and customer engagement. Ofgem said lack of installer capacity should not slow suppliers’ performance in rolling out meters. Nor should high ‘abort’ rates – suppliers said aborts had increased in 2019, but Ofgem said suppliers ahould improve their information gathering when making appointments and have ‘keep warm’ plans when installations were delyed. The price cap was also no excuse : “while inefficient suppliers may need to improve their efficiency, the default tariff cap must not be used as justification for reducing plans to install smart meters,” Ofgem said.
Suppliers should consider ‘re-contact’ strategies for customers that declined smart meters, but Ofgem warned, “overly repetitive and coercive approaches, as opposed to innovative and tailored re-contact strategies, can be counterproductive in delivery of the rollout obligations.”
Ofgem also warned suppliers that: “it is of critical importance that all suppliers are not only DCC users, but also live on the DCC systems,” so their smart meters are fully functional – including meters that suppliers take on when a customers switches to them (provided the meter types has been adopted into the DCC). “Some suppliers are not yet fully compliant with these obligations,” Ofgem said. It recently fined Avro Energy for failing to join DCC.
It listed four technical problems that had still to be solved but said that it expected progress on those issues by the end of 2019:
- The full range of meter variants are not yet available from meter manufacturers,
- HAN coverage is not available in all premises,
- There is no Smets2 pre-payment option that can be deployed at scale
- Not all energy suppliers have Smets2 meters that meet radio frequency (RF) limits in all regions.
Meanwhile the regulator has told six companies to improve the energy efficiency advice given when they install smart meters.
Further reading
Suppliers with more than 150k customers obliged to offer export tariff from 31 December
Avro must sign up to smart meter hub by 25 July, Ofgem says