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Could a smart meter help you manage your household budgets?
Installed by your energy supplier at no extra cost, smart meters track how much energy you’re using daily, weekly and monthly - helping you manage your household budgets and work out where small changes could help you use less. Plus, they can help us respond more quickly if you have a power cut.
Request your installation. Search ‘get a smart meter’ today.
Or visit Smart Energy GB for further information
Take a look at SSEN’s Data Privacy Plan. It explains how we collect, aggregate, and use smart meter consumption data to make improvements for our customers and our network.
Smart meters will facilitate the transition to a low carbon energy economy by helping customers better understand and control their energy consumption to both save energy and reduce bills.
Meter readings are sent automatically to your energy supplier allowing for accurate bills which should mean no more estimated bills or meter reader visits to your home.
Great Britain smart meter programme
The UK Government wants energy suppliers to offer a smart meter to every home in England, Wales and Scotland by mid-2025. There are more than 26 million homes for the energy suppliers to get to.
Your energy supplier is responsible for supplying and fitting smart meters, including maintaining the meter and your ongoing billing.
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks as your network operator, have a role to play in making the best use of the information smart meters provide. This will help improve our service to you, for example during power cuts, voltage enquiries and will help us to better manage our network and investment decisions to deliver an efficient low carbon and reliable electricity network.
What does this mean for SSEN and our Customers?
What does this mean for SSEN and our customers?
The information we receive and can obtain from smart meters will facilitate the development of smart grids and transition to a low carbon future. Visibility of the demand and load on our network is important to ensure we can operate an efficient and flexible system of electricity, connect low carbon technologies and make better investment decisions.
In addition, the near real-time information that smart meters can send us will help deliver an improved service to you. Smart meters can send automatic alerts to SSEN when there is a power cut or problems with the voltage. These alerts will enable our teams to respond and resolve issues quicker during supply related incidents.
SSEN will only access and use smart meter data in order to fulfil its Regulatory Duties and deliver improvements of its network and to our customers, such as:
- Avoided costs of network investment on Low Voltage network
- Reduction in network reinforcement
- Better visibility of network load profiles
- Proactive intervention of issues causing power failures
- Improved understanding of energy use during the transition to a Distribution System Operator (DSO) and uptake of low carbon technologies.
- Use power outage and power restoration alerts to respond and restore power cuts more quickly.
- Use the energisation checker when a single customer reports a power issue at their property to help us remotely identify a problem on our network or on the customer's internal equipment.
Ofgem, the industry regulator, has approved SSEN’s Data Privacy Plan to access half-hourly electricity consumption data in an aggregated format. SSEN will typically be collecting and aggregating the half-hourly consumption data on a regular basis for sections of our low voltage network and will not be storing individual customers half-hourly consumption data.
For more information, please refer to Ofgem’s approval letter on “SSEN’s data privacy plan for access to household electricity smart metering data”
To view our Ofgem approved Data Privacy Plan, please refer to SSEN’s Data Privacy Plan
We have reviewed and updated our Data Privacy Plan in May 2023 to incorporate changes to how we collect, hold and aggregate smart meter consumption data, and how we will publish smart meter consumption data onto our open data portal or website to the energy sector and consumers, as permitted under our Regulated Duties.
How will we communicate and use smart meter data?
At the moment the number of smart meters installed in SSEN’s network is relatively low, which means the benefits available will increase over time as suppliers maximise the rollout of smart meter installations over the coming years.
Alerts generated from your smart meter to us
The image below explains how your smart meter will send alerts when the power supply is interrupted or problems with the voltage occur. These alerts will arrive into SSEN systems allowing us to better identify problems and respond appropriately and more quickly.
How we can collect data from your smart meter
The below image explains how SSEN can communicate with the smart meter and collect network data in order to fulfil our Regulatory Duties and operate a smarter network. The data we collect will be stored in a secure database and where required anonymised. The data will be used to improve a number of services we provide our customers.
