The revision of Switzerland’s electricity supply ordinance, in force since 1 January 2018, requires Swiss network operators to fit 80 % of their metering points with smart meters by 2027, prioritising free-market consumers and new generation installations. Switzerland thereby joins most European countries.
The obligation did not appear from nowhere. A federal energy office study in 2012, updated in 2015, concluded that rolling out 80 % of meters over ten years would cost around CHF 0.8 billion, or CHF 230 per meter, for a benefit of CHF 1.1 to 1.5 billion. It set two conditions: a general roll-out rather than a piecemeal one, and a binding legal basis on timing.
Four objectives, one of them hard to reach
- Reducing consumption by letting customers see their usage in real time. This is the least certain: experience shows that deploying meters alone is rarely enough, and that additional smart home or energy management services must accompany it.
- Offering new services that monetise the customer’s value to the system, through granular tariffs exposing customers to price signals, or remote control of solar installations and charging points.
- Facilitating possible market liberalisation, by making supplier switching straightforward.
- Improving operational efficiency in distribution, particularly meter reading, and laying a foundation stone for smart grids.
A grey area operators cannot avoid
This is the central strategic issue. The meter must meet minimum specifications set by the ordinance, but many options remain at the operator’s discretion: measurement interval, data measured, enriched user interface, home automation capability, communication architecture, IT architecture and data management.
Several of these choices raise the question of the boundary between regulated and competitive activities, smart city services or data hubs in particular. That grey area cannot be avoided, and the meter itself could end up inside it.
The Federal Court’s decision of 14 July 2017, ruling in favour of a generator seeking to use a third party for metering services, indeed opens the question of a de facto liberalisation of the metering market, covering installation, maintenance, reading and data transmission. Several European countries have already opened theirs: the Netherlands, the UK, Germany.
A comparison issue compounds this. With deployment costs passed through into regulated tariffs under separate accounting, they will be comparable between operators under Sunshine regulation.
Seven roll-outs Switzerland can learn from
More than 700 million meters have been deployed worldwide. Several cases are particularly instructive.
Germany declined the European 80 % target for 2020 and is spreading its roll-out to 2028, with a distinct architecture: a bidirectional communication device installed at the customer’s premises, the Smart Meter Gateway, administered by an entity the customer can choose. The United Kingdom assigned the roll-out to suppliers rather than network operators, and centralised data collection and provision with a dedicated company. Sweden, comparable in size to Switzerland, completed its roll-out in 2009 and was already planning a second replacement wave. Austria offers the closest comparison on operator size. Italy deployed 35 million meters, notably to cut non-technical losses. France entrusted 35 million Linky meters to its distribution operator. The United States had around 55 % of metering points equipped by 2016.
Within Switzerland, several distributors had anticipated the obligation through pilot programmes or piecemeal deployment of load-curve meters with remote reading, particularly for self-consumers.
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