Continued social distancing measures and a ban on non-essential site visits to ensure the safety of households and field engineers led to a decrease in smart meter installs in March and a huge 95 percent drop in April.
The number of smart meter installs for May stayed similarly low, with just over 17,000 installations taking place nationwide, 92 percent less than May 2019’s 210,000 smart meter installations. However, May 2020’s figure is 49 percent more than April 2020, and since non-essential site visits have resumed from the end of May we have seen an increase in daily meter installations.
East England had the most installations with 2,200, followed by the East Midlands with 2,000 installs and Southern England with 2,000. The cumulative number of installations since the programme began is just under 13.4mn.
In Q3 last year, BEIS announced the smart meter installs rollout deadline would be pushed back to 2024, and Ofgem has indicated it will review its planned works for 2020.
These insights were provided by ElectraLink’s Data Transfer Service Operations Team. For any questions on the information or data sources, please contact our helpdesk at [email protected] or call 020 7432 3012 for any questions about our energy market data services.
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The analysis is based on the D0150 data flows transmitted across our network and we believe capture the vast majority of smart meter installations.
The users of the DTS have given ElectraLink permission to intercept and analyse this, and other data flows, subject to certain conditions.
Our analysis defines smart meters as those models with the capability to handle time of use tariffs and which can be remotely updated.
For installations after September 2013, we count all meters flagged as SMETS1, SMETS2 or non-SMETS. For installations before the industry standard designation was agreed, the allocation is based on the make and model of meter.