Way back in September 2017, an item in The Register quoted Professor Gordon Hughes, an economist at the University of Edinburgh, as saying:
‘The introduction of the smart meter is a dog’s breakfast. At best it is misconceived and an astonishingly expensive project. For those claiming it will bring major savings, I say they need to grow up’.
Well, here we are in June 2023 and the UK National Audit Office’s recent, highly readable, update summary on the rollout of smart meters points out that the likely annual savings for a typical dual-fuel household with a smart meter functioning in smart mode, will amount to around three or four cans of cheap dog food per month. This isn’t a fit return for long-suffering households, especially when, as the NAO summary points out, the Smart Meter programme is one of the largest in government by whole-life cost, equivalent in scale to the Crossrail railway project. It appears that ’a dog’s breakfast’ is, indeed, still an apt description for the programme given the benefit to energy consumers of just a few cans of dog food a month.
The NAO highlights that the rollout timescale has been extended again, costs continue to rise, and that less than 50% of UK households have a Smart Meter actually operating in smart mode. They also point out that energy suppliers and the Department of Energy Security & Net Zero disagree on the best way to achieve the remainder of the rollout. Having read the NAO summary in its entirety, the Badger’s left with the impression that the new targets are unlikely to be delivered by 2025, and that consumers will never get any real benefit from this programme. Hold on, you might say, this programme was never really about consumers, it’s about the bigger strategic picture of creating an efficient, decarbonised, modernised, UK power system better aligned to a 21st century energy generation mix containing a high proportion of renewables. That’s a fair point, but it doesn’t change the fact that the whole thing looks like an expensive dog’s breakfast because the dynamics to date don’t support the premise that the programme will meet any strategic objectives within the next decade.
The experience of many consumers with Smart Meters hasn’t been great, see here for example, and so mistrust of energy suppliers and ambivalence about the usefulness of the technology abounds. Regardless of ‘a big picture’, if a programme continually fails to deliver and breeds mistrust amongst consumers then it’s become a millstone. Notwithstanding this, there’s too much political, government, energy industry, and financial capital already invested for things to dramatically change. This means, of course, that tracking consumer benefits in terms of cans of dog food per month is here to stay for the foreseeable future!
