NEWS

In January 2025, the UK’s smart meter rollout achieved a significant milestone. The Data Communications Company (DCC) announced that 20 million homes and businesses are now connected to their network, utilising over 33 million smart meters.

While it’s right to celebrate this achievement, it shouldn’t mask the massive underlying problems with the smart meter rollout. The rollout has been plagued with a history of technical issues, budget and time extensions, not to mention a global pandemic. However, when you analyse the figures, the future doesn’t look much brighter.

 

In this article, we’ll look at how the smart meter rollout can use this milestone as something to build upon, or not. 

 

The stats

 

The 20 millionth home (or business) to get a smart meter was in Ayr, Scotland. EDF Energy completed the installation at lunchtime on Wednesday January 15th. This sparked a big celebration from the authorities behind the rollout, but the overall figures do not look so good. 

The latest complete installation figures are for Q3 in 2024. During this quarter, 710,000 smart meters were installed in the UK. This number is a rise of 2.9% from Q2 2024. However, it also represents a 16% fall year-on-year from the same quarter in 2023. 

Regarding yearly figures, 2.37 million smart meters were installed in 2024. That’s 1.5% lower than 2023’s total of 2.4 million. In 2024, October was the busiest month, with 231,000 smart meter installations. On the other hand, December saw only 152,000 installations, the lowest number of smart meter fittings for that month in five years. This decline is not good news for the rollout.

However, the DCC was celebrating the milestone and looking on the bright side. According to its estimates, with more than half of UK homes using smart meters and using them to save energy, the country is preventing more than 1 million tonnes of carbon from being emitted per year. That’s the same as taking 1 million cars off the road.

 

The problem

 

The big problem for the DCC and the other stakeholders in the rollout is the year-on-year decline from 2023. It signifies that pretty much everyone in the country who wanted a smart meter now has one. That means the ‘low-hanging fruit’ has been picked and the only people left to reach are those who don’t want a smart meter. To persuade them to get one will be challenging – and expensive.

There are several reasons people might now want smart meters:

• They’re concerned about the privacy implications
• They don’t understand the benefits of having a smart meter
• Their current meter works fine, so why change it?
• They simply don’t want a stranger coming into their home

‘Dumb’ mode

Another startling statistic (this one uncovered by the DESNZ) is that out of all the 37+ million smart meters in use in the UK, 10% are not using their smart functionality. Instead, they’re running in traditional or ‘dumb’ mode. 

One of the problems with this is that customers might not even know their meters aren’t functioning properly, let alone have the compulsion to get it fixed. As well as getting holdouts to relent and install smart meters, the authorities must find the meters running in dumb mode and get them back online. It’s a daunting task.

Trouble ahead

With a major milestone achieved and a new DCC CEO (Chris Lovett) coming in, it should be a time for optimism about the smart meter rollout. However, they have a big challenge ahead. Stakeholders need to establish fresh momentum for the rollout in the face of declining installations and a lack of easy wins. 

Can they identify the right people, create the right marketing campaigns and book those installations? Or is the UK smart meter rollout about to fizzle out? We’ll have to wait and see.