What water can learn from energy's smart meter rollout

Water companies have recently started (or are about to start) the largest metering programme the sector has ever attempted.

Ofwat's PR24 final determinations back the installation of more than 10.4 million smart meters between 2025 and 2030, supported by £1.7bn of enhancement funding. Energy has already spent over a decade living through a comparable rollout, and it hasn't always gone smoothly. The water sector can benefit significantly by learning from these lessons. 

Below are three things energy's experience should teach water, followed by what good delivery looks like as AMP8 ramps up and AMP9 comes into view.

Lesson one: Targets without delivery capability just create risk

Energy's smart meter programme was meant to be finished by 2019. It wasn't. By March 2023, only 57% of meters were smart, and the deadline had been pushed back three times. Ofgem has since penalised suppliers for missing annual targets: 31 of 49 suppliers missed their 2022 electricity targets alone, and the sector paid £10.8m in penalties that year.

The ambition wasn’t the problem. What lagged was the operational machinery needed to hit it: Workforce planning, scheduling discipline, and control of aborted appointments. Analysis in this article by BFY’s Jon Vincent & Drew Jackson puts the energy sector's abort rate at around 23%, costing the industry roughly £100m a year in wasted visits.

Water is setting itself installation targets on a similar scale. The lesson from energy is to build the delivery model, the workforce flexibility, and the abort-tracking discipline before volumes ramp up, not after.

Lesson two: Installed isn't the same as working

Around 40 million smart energy meters are now installed in Great Britain, but only 36.7 million are actually operating in smart mode. More than 8% of installed meters are stuck in traditional mode, often silently, leaving customers without the benefits they were promised and, in some cases, moved onto less favourable tariffs.

For water, the equivalent risk is a meter that's physically fitted but isn't reliably transmitting usable data. Tracking "meters installed" tells you about programme pace. Tracking "meters delivering value" tells you whether the investment is actually working. It’s clear that some water companies have learnt this lesson, with several opting to procure meters through Data as a Service arrangements, where payments are made for data which must come from working installed meters.

Lesson three: Customer trust has to be earned, not assumed

Energy's rollout ran into a slower-than-hoped uptake, confusion over the benefits, and public concern about data. The Public Accounts Committee was blunt about it: The department hadn't done enough to convince consumers of the case for smart meters before pushing hard on installation numbers.

Water companies have a version of this challenge coming, and for some customers it's a bigger one. Where a smart meter accompanies a move from unmetered to metered billing, it isn't just a new device on the wall, it can change what someone pays for water. That conversation needs to happen well ahead of the appointment, not in response to a complaint afterwards.

Getting AMP8, and AMP9, right

Water is still early in its own journey on more than one front. According to Environment Agency estimates, only around 60% of households across England currently pay for water on a meter at all, a figure that's moved slowly for years.

Smart meters are a smaller slice again: Around 13% of households currently have one, rising to roughly 48% of households and non-households by 2030 as the AMP8 programme lands. Most of these installs will upgrade existing metered properties to smart technology; a smaller, but far from trivial, share will put previously unmetered customers onto a meter for the first time.

That's the real opportunity: The smart rollout is more than a technology upgrade for customers already on a meter, it's one of the biggest levers water companies have had in years to grow the overall metered base itself. Ofwat's AMP8 settlement backs this with £1.7bn in enhancement funding, alongside £260m for water efficiency and a further £100m efficiency fund.

The goals are significant, with England having a statutory target to cut water use per person by 20% by 2038 against a 2019/20 baseline, working towards 110 litres per day by 2050, against roughly 136 litres per day today. Around 19% of water is still lost to leakage before it reaches customers.

Smart metering is central to closing both gaps, but only if three things go right across AMP8 and into AMP9.

Build delivery capability before volume

First, ramping up installs has to happen alongside a serious grip on aborted visits, not instead of one. In energy, "unable to locate meter" is one of the biggest single reasons for a wasted visit.

This problem is likely to be exacerbated for water with meters sitting under driveways, inside boundary boxes buried away from the property, or in locations that have shifted or been built over since the original install.

Pre-visit risk assessments need to go beyond confirming an appointment slot, it needs to confirm meter location, chamber type, and access requirements before an engineer is on site. Combined with the scheduling discipline and root-cause tracking that energy is now retrofitting at cost. That groundwork should be built in from day one, especially as install rates climb towards the pace some companies are already contracting for.

Invest in customer understanding

Second, customer education deserves the same investment as the installation programme itself. Explaining the benefits, and being upfront about billing changes for newly metered customers, will do more for uptake and goodwill than any amount of technical reliability.

Turn data into operational value

Third, the data has to go somewhere. A smart meter generates volumes of near real-time consumption data most water operations teams haven't handled before.

The value sits in what that data drives: Faster leak detection, sharper demand management, and measurable progress on per capita consumption, not in the reporting dashboard alone. That means investing in the analytics, alerting, and field response models that turn data into action, alongside the meters themselves.

Bringing energy's lessons into water

BFY Group have spent over a decade working alongside energy suppliers and metering partners through exactly these challenges, from reducing abort rates to building customer communication around major billing change.

As water utilities scale up delivery through AMP8 and start shaping plans for AMP9, that experience of what tends to go right, and wrong, in a large-scale metering rollout might be a useful reference point. If it would help to compare notes, we're always happy to talk it through. Contact Neal Edmondson for more.