1.5 million smart meters installed in households as part of a nationwide rollout will lose their smart functionality if home-owners decide to switch energy supplier. The whole point of the meters is that consumers are better informed about energy use and thus better equipped to switch to a better deal..

Unbelievably, the government did not require energy suppliers, who are obliged to install smart meters in their customers homes, to make their smart meters compatible with their competitors. To ‘fix’ the problem, DECC has commissioned, at great expense, a centralised communications network that will ‘decode’ the smart meter data from each supplier. It could be years before the government’s system is up and running…

Techno understands that during conception of the smart meter project, a senior civil servant rejected the idea of implementing an open standard for smart meter data that would have avoided this problem and saved the tax-payer millions. They couldn’t believe that an open standard could be implemented for free and plumbed for the vastly more expensive option…