Last week the British Infrastructure Group (BIG), comprising 93 Members of Parliament and the House of Lords, delivered a devastating report on the British Smart Metering Project. Titled “Not So Smart”, their headline assessment is that it is a “roll-out which is set to become yet another large scale public infrastructure project delivered well over budget which fails to deliver the expected benefits.”
It is very gratifying to see the issues I’ve been writing about for the last six years confirmed. In the past, the energy industry and civil servants have succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of various Parliamentary Committees, who, lacking adequate technical expertise, have simply repeated the mantra that the project is more or less on track. The British Infrastructure Group have cut through that obfuscation. In their summary they suggest that the average consumer saving will be reduced to just £11 per year.
Whilst I applaud this report, I fear that the group members may still be wearing their rose-tinted ermine. Their conclusion about the reduced savings comes from looking back at BEIS’ numbers from 2016. If you look forward at the additional problems and costs which are still in the pipeline it becomes clear that the GB Smart Metering programme is no longer financially viable. Rather than a saving of £11 per year for each household, it’s more likely to result in an increase in annual energy bills of £67 for the next decade. With the publication of this report, the last vestiges of BEIS accountability have been ripped away.
Let’s examine what is still going wrong.