You can say one thing for the energy crisis. It’s finally got British households monitoring energy use more carefully than at any time since the 70s. Thank goodness then, that successive British Governments have been rolling out smart meters for the last 11 years at £485 per household (more than twice the cost of installation in Italy and Spain and ten times more than India and Brazil). Still, at least the smart meters are largely installed, which saves the customer on engineer visits and makes billing more precise.

Except these economies have not come to pass. Many smart meters don’t work if there’s a change in energy supplier. And even if they do, smart meters almost all rely on 2G and 3G signals which mobile operators are about to shut off. Yet still consumers must cough up a further £2billion to complete the installation, even though the devices will be obsolete by 2033.

Welcome to the smart meter scandal. It’s been a fiasco across the whole of Britain and a total scandal in Scotland.

The story starts with Margaret Thatcher. We are still living with her poisoned legacy – a chaotic, privatised energy market with dozens of suppliers. So, when other countries moved to install smart meters – able to price energy use more efficiently and deliver accurate bills minus customer readings – a single nationalised or private body was given the job.

Not in Britain. In 2006, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced the smart meter revolution would be rolled out via the Tories’ privatised energy supply companies. The consumers’ group Which? wanted a single government body to install whole streets at a time and keep costs down. But in 2011, the new Tory energy minister Charles Hendry authorised private energy companies to install meters on demand from customers, with badgering letters and emails when Ofgem demanded greater take-up. The cost to taxpayers: £11.1 billion.

And so, with Labour and the Tories flushing business towards private energy suppliers, the hopeless patchwork of random smart meter installation began.

Soon it became clear metered consumers weren’t changing energy consumption patterns. Indeed, Mike O’Brien, Gordon Brown’s former energy minister, admitted in 2018 that he got rid of his meter because he “barely looked at it”. Other ex-ministers said the programme had been rushed through because politicians wanted to meet the Paris accord climate change targets.

So far, so bad. But the fiasco had a few extra twists in Scotland.

About half a million customers living in tenements have storage heating with two meters (one for night-time and the other for daytime use) and no company will take responsibility for replacing them with a single smart meter. Citizens Advice estimates 52.3% of these customers are living in fuel poverty, but they’ll bear all the costs of maintaining old-fashioned meter readings. And they’ll miss out on new ‘smart’ deals.

In February, Scottish Power, EDF and Octopus Energy, who supply 11 million British households, announced new time-of-use tariffs, where boiling a kettle in the evening costs more than the morning. How do they know when the kettle boils? Via the smart meter. And if there is no smart meter? Good question.

It gets worse. Scottish customers received far fewer second-generation meters and relatively more of the ‘old’ SMETS1 meters kitted with 2 and 3G transmitters which cannot be upgraded. So now that companies like Vodafone are moving to 5G and switching off their lower frequencies, Scotland’s million-odd SMETS1 users will soon discover their 'new' meters must be replaced and energy users will once again foot the bill for this government/industry mistake.

It’s hard not to conclude that the roll-out of smart meters – £13.5 billion to date to connect 47% of households – has been a near total waste of time and money.

Indeed, had GCHQ not intervened in 2016, the rollout could have been a security danger as well, since electricity and gas suppliers intended to install over 53 million smart meters with a single decryption key for communications so hackers would need access to just one network to cause chaotic power surges across the country.

In 2018, the National Audit Office warned that consumers faced paying half a billion pounds more than expected for the smart meter scheme with no chance it would meet its deadline. Still the unstoppable rollout continued.

Essentially, on Boris Johnson’s watch (since energy is reserved to Westminster), even more cash has been spent on technology the industry knows to be fundamentally flawed and the cost has been absorbed by consumers, adding to our present sky-high bills.

Indeed, faced with long overdue regulation it’s possible most energy suppliers don’t actually want to provide energy any more. Companies which chanced their arms for years, enduring mis-selling scandals aplenty now face a price-cap. And despite the recent whopping rise announced by Ofgem, they cannot make the massive profits of yesteryear by just selling energy. Top managers are feeling no pain – there’s no cap on their ludicrously high salaries. But companies like SSE have already sold their supply business to concentrate on the more lucrative business of energy production.

The energy scene has actually changed so much, there’s a very real question mark over the future of the new Big Six – what are they actually for? If industry regulation and smart meters actually worked, why would we need any energy supply companies?

Yet as consumers buckle under the latest price hikes, caused largely by the failure of successive governments to shift Britain’s unique dependency on gas for heating – Tory ministers are taking lazy pops at green levies, not the £13.5 billion we are all paying for a failed smart meter system. Since Labour was complicit in the disastrous scheme, there’s not much opposition from them either.

Regardless, the rollout should be stopped in its tracks for a total rethink. If it isn’t – and it won’t be – we’ll all be financing a smart meter revolution that’s been a total dud.

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