Against the clock: NI’s smart meter rollout
With no technical specification, no dedicated funding settlement and an Assembly election looming, Northern Ireland's smart meter rollout faces big questions before the first meter goes on the wall. Utility Week and CGI brought together key stakeholders to debate how to get it right.
By Jane Gray, group intelligence director
Against the clock: NI’s smart meter rollout
With no technical specification, no dedicated funding settlement and an Assembly election looming, Northern Ireland's smart meter rollout faces big questions before the first meter goes on the wall. Utility Week and CGI brought together key stakeholders to debate how to get it right.
By Jane Gray, group intelligence director
It has taken over a decade, and yet Great Britain still hasn’t completed its smart meter rollout. Northern Ireland (NI) wants to go from a standing start to having first meters on the wall in 2028, and the whole job done within the subsequent three years. That is the headline for the country that is just embarking on a mission to roll out the technology to over 900,000 homes and businesses.
The programme represents a bid to unlock the intelligence and visibility NI needs to push forward its energy transition, allowing for the optimisation of renewables, integration of low-carbon technologies and realisation of demand-side potential – and hopefully, reducing customers’ bills, or at least mitigating against their future increase. As in the rest of the UK, these goals are central to the ability to provide an affordable, clean and resilient energy system for consumers of all varieties.
To make its smart metering ambitions a reality, NI has a unique opportunity to avoid the pitfalls that have tainted the rest of the UK’s smart metering experience over the past decade and more, aiming to leapfrog from its position as an international smart metering straggler (most European households now have a smart meter and even GB’s troubled rollout has now hit 75% coverage) to full deployment and delivery of associated value-add services for customers in around three years.
It’s a bold ambition – especially given the Design Plan for NI’s smart meter rollout was only published in April this year and detail on what it will look like in practice is thin on the ground.
We know Northern Ireland Electricity Networks (NIEN) will own the installation process, and the set-up of all the supporting technology systems – though nothing has yet been included in its RP7 regulatory settlement to accommodate the specific cost of smart metering; NIEN will need to agree a position with the Utility Regulator via the re-opener mechanism or via a licence modification.
Furthermore, to date, there is no technical specification for the preferred metering technologies, what communications and connectivity solutions will be used, how retail market arrangements will be aligned, or what the detailed governance and accountability framework for the rollout will look like.
With an NI Assembly election set for spring 2027, pressure is now building to tackle these uncertainties and avoid the risk of the rollout becoming a political football, to the detriment of the country’s long-term interests.
A meeting of minds
It was in this context that Utility Week – in partnership with CGI – hosted a roundtable debate in Northern Ireland, uniting stakeholders in its smart meter rollout, to discuss what it will take to make it a success story.
Our group of infrastructure, technology, retail, policy and regulatory experts covered a litany of considerations which need to be addressed, from how to pitch the value proposition of smart metering to business and domestic consumers, to the data connectivity solutions required to serve NI’s rural landscape.
Discussion around the former area quickly dived into concerns around social equity. The benefits of smart meters are most obvious and accessible to those better-off customers who can afford to invest in low-carbon technologies like electric vehicles, home batteries and solar PV. How to convince less-affluent customers that the system-wide benefits of enhanced demand visibility are worth the cost of the rollout (estimated to exceed £500 million) remained moot.
Penetration of prepay meters in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland’s USPs
In GB, prepayment meters are commonly associated with consumer hardship, but this is far from the case in NI where prepayment is a popular lifestyle choice for those wanting transparency and control over their energy consumption. With these factors also being the baseline consumer benefit for smart metering, our group agreed that there is an absolute imperative for smart meters to, as a minimum, match the functionality and experience of existing pre-pay solutions on accuracy and ease of use. This will require more than just careful meter technology choices; it will also mean a fastidious review of underlying retail market processes, said our group.
On connectivity for customers smattered across NI’s rural expanses, our debate surfaced a collective interest in exploiting the country’s exceptional broadband coverage to overcome telecoms reliability challenges.
According to Ofcom, NI customers benefit from around 95% full-fibre broadband coverage – outperforming the rest of the UK by a significant margin. Our group were keen to see NI make the most of this “strategic advantage” to overcome the issues that more conventional telecoms connectivity solutions would encounter with meters installed in remote, stone-walled homes. Opting for broadband connectivity might also shield NI from the substantial ongoing costs associated with the relatively short shelf-life of mobile networks – the need to update meters and systems to allow for 2G and 3G redundancy in GB has become a major cost burden on its rollout.
Full-fibre broadband penetration in Northern Ireland
While this opportunity seemed appealing, it was also described as a “bold” option, with experienced minds issuing reality checks. Opting for a unique smart meter connectivity solution would also likely imply bespoke meter technology which would itself be costly and come with ongoing service risks – never mind the fact that, even with 95% coverage, almost 50,000 homes and businesses would remain offline. Likewise, transferring consumer data over broadband would land NI with some tricky consumer consent and data security conundrums to address.
The call to arms
The finer details of both these key lines of debate would provide ample scrolling time, but the key takeaway is that NI’s smart meter rollout challenge does not start with getting meters on walls – beginning in around 15 months’ time if policy goals can actually be delivered.
Before this practical activity can begin there is a monumental amount of work to be done to align a wide range of industry stakeholders and policy leaders around an agreed set of desirable outcomes from smart metering. These should make it clear, said our group, which outcomes are immediate must-haves and which are nice-to-have fillips which can be designed-in at a later date.
With these priorities in place, an appropriate high-level design for smart metering systems and technology specifications can be drawn up to deliver the fundamental requirements of the programme and build-in a reasonable level of future-proofing. To achieve this desired alignment around outcomes, our guests were near-unanimous in calling for a clear governance and accountability framework for the rollout to be established within the next few months.
It’s not just current timeline ambitions for the smart meter rollout which make this an imperative. The looming Assembly election was a cause for genuine anxiety around the table. Given NI’s political climate, there was well-founded feeling that a semi-formed smart metering programme with high costs and a less-than compelling value narrative for chunks of the electorate could easily be side-wiped. As one participant pointed out, NI’s Department for the Economy has “had five ministers in six years and nobody knows what the department will look like in a year’s time”.
If NI’s energy industry and its stakeholders believe in the benefits universal smart metering will bring to its energy transition, the race is now on to develop a robust, funded plan for deployment and public engagement, which is as invulnerable as possible to becoming bogged down in never-ending analysis and debate.
But perhaps, just perhaps, being late to the smart metering party will mean that NI can capitalise on the experience of others to deliver the promised benefits to consumers more quickly – and more cost effectively – than we’ve seen elsewhere.
Comment:
Stuart Brand, VP utilities consulting at CGI offers his reflections on our roundtable discussion
Comment:
Stuart Brand, VP utilities consulting at CGI offers his reflections on our roundtable discussion
Northern Ireland’s smart metering programme is moving from policy discussion into delivery reality. But deploying smart meters is not simply another asset rollout; they are the foundation of a more visible, flexible and affordable electricity system: one that can also empower consumers. The roundtable reinforced the scale of the opportunity and the discipline required to realise it.
Inevitably the temptation will be to focus on the first milestone: getting the first meters on walls in 2028, but success will be judged by what those meters enable. Are pre-payment customers given an experience at least as good as the one they value today? Can small businesses use data to understand and manage consumption? Are privacy, consent and cyber security designed in from the start? Is the communications approach robust enough for rural homes, older properties and indoor meter locations?
Northern Ireland has one key advantage: by starting later it can learn from others. GB, the Republic of Ireland and wider global programmes show the value of clear governance, simple technology choices, strong consumer engagement and a practical benefits case.
The next step is to turn ambition into an integrated delivery blueprint: with clear outcomes, clear accountabilities and a relentless focus on usable data, trusted services and consumer value.
