Over 31.3 million smart meters in GB

At the end of 2022, the penetration of smart meters in Britain reached 55% – 57% for electricity, 53% for gas – up from 49% at the end of 2021.

By the end of the year, approximately 18.1 million smart electricity meters and 13.1 million smart gas meters were installed in homes and small businesses in Britain.

Of these meters, 28.1 million – 16.5 million electricity and 11.6 million gas – were operating in smart mode, with just 3.2 million operating in traditional mode.

Of them also, 15.1 million were SMETS1 and 14.8 million were SMETS2, while 1.3 million were advanced meters.

Have you read?
Home energy usage data goes under spotlight in UK
Unlocking smart meter data for research

And 13% of the smart meters were operating in prepayment mode, similar to the end of the previous year.

The statistical update from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero reports that a total of 3.7 million smart and advanced electricity and gas meters were installed in Britain in 2022, of which 3.6 million were in domestic properties.

This corresponds to a decrease of 4% on the 2021 installations, although the installations by large suppliers, which operate almost all metering sites in the domestic sector and about three-quarters in the non-domestic sector, increased steadily in the second half of 2022.

The report notes the 20% increase to 26.4 million in the number of domestic smart meters operating in smart mode from the end of 2021 to end of 2022, attributing it to both new installations as well as the ongoing enrolment of dormant SMETS1 meters to the national network.

The report also points out that while small suppliers operate just 1% of metering sites in the domestic sector, they continue to operate a larger proportion of smart meters than the large suppliers in the non-domestic sector – 59% versus 48%.

Subsequent updates for 2023 from Electralink, which monitors smart electricity meter rollout data, are that there were 183,000 installations in January and 182,000 in February – down on the average 197,000 per month in 2022.

Electralink has also recorded the 20 millionth smart electricity meter install in February, while also the number of homes connected to the Data Communications Company (DCC) network reached the 50% mark in the same month.

Data from the DCC indicate that more than 25.3 million smart meters are currently connected to its network, with the average daily connection rate running at almost 16,000.

There are in Britain approximately 31.8 million electricity and 24.9 million gas domestic and small business metering points – 29.3 million electricity and 24.1 million gas domestic and 2.5 million electricity and 0.8 million gas non-domestic.