What are the benefits of having a smart meter?
Smart meters offer many benefits for our customers. They help them manage their energy consumption and automatically send meter readings on a monthly, daily or half-hourly basis so customers are billed to actual reads rather than estimates. Smart meters also allow for two way communication, which enables us to configure meters remotely rather than visiting the site. Alerts are provided in real time to identify if there is a fault or other issue with the meter, often allowing for remote diagnosis.
Who is involved in the smart meter roll-out?
We have a dedicated team structure to support the smart roll out led by William Humphreys.
Sara Smalley focuses on the operations side, I manage deployment performance and Richard Humphreys is the business process architect (see below for the full team structure). Richard has also delivered training across all four offices to more than 300 staff.
We've worked closely with Tom Holbourn in marketing to create a homepage for smart metering, which includes everything from the business benefits to a comprehensive FAQs section and forms to request a meter upgrade, promoted through five pilot email and direct mail campaigns to 2,500 SME customers to date. We've also published a guide to smart meters on Real Business, a leading SME news and advice website and shared the benefits of smart meters with SME customers via our Connect newsletter.
Since the launch in May, we've had more than 2,200 customer views of our dedicated smart page, with 120 meter upgrade requests. Currently TGP have completed 17 smart meter installs with our metering partner SMS Plc and inherited another 26 smart meters from other suppliers.
These pilots have enabled us to shape the customer journey, and we’re now gearing up to promote smart meters to our customers on a wider scale – with an aim to contact all eligible SME and MB customers by the end of 2019.
What are the main milestones of the smart programme?
A big win has been achieving accreditation as a smart supplier and delivering Phase 1 of the Smart project in 2018, which enables us to both install and inherit smart meters successfully . We have attained SMICOP (Smart Meter Installation Code of Practice) accreditation, completed the Smart Licence annual audit with Deloitte (for the second year) and implemented the Deployment Extract and Agent Engagement tool (WFS) in 2019.
The government has recently pushed back the deadline for the smart energy meter rollout by four years to 2024.
What are the next steps?
We’re continuing to build our expertise, with ongoing training for teams to ensure seamless deployment.
SMETS1 (first generation smart meter) software is being updated industry-wide to allow seamless supplier switching and automated reads, helping both suppliers and customers. TGP have over 700 SMETS1 meters in our current portfolio.
In the next six months we’ll deliver Phase 2 which will implement the automation of our smart data communications with the Data Communications Company (DCC), the industry body in charge of maintaining the national infrastructure that underpins the roll-out of smart meters across the UK. This will be a lengthy process of design, build and test which includes our 3rd parties Utiligroup and SMS, to ensure that TGP are able to support mass deployment. It's vital to our customer experience as we anticipate installing approximately 20,000 SMETS2 meters across our portfolio!
