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Energy billing and metering: changing customer behaviour

The 2007 Energy White Paper: meetting the energy challenge underlined the Government’s commitment to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Saving energy is a starting point for meeting both our short and long-term goals, and all sections of society can play a part by reducing energy consumption. The Energy White Paper set out a range of billing and measuring measures designed to give consumers direct access to information about their energy use to help them reduce energy consumption. The core proposals were:

• to promote awareness of domestic energy use through a requirement on energy suppliers to present consumption data on consumers’ bills to allow them to compare different periods of energy consumption.
• to promote awareness of domestic energy use through a requirement to provide customers with real-time display units so that they can see in real time, and in a way relevant to them, how much energy they are consuming and what it is costing.
• to ensure that business customers in those sectors of the market where it was now cost-effective would receive smart meters over the next five years.

The Energy White Paper also set out the Government’s expectations that smart metering would be provided to all business and domestic customers over the next decade.

This consultation sought views about energy billing and metering proposals and how they might best be taken forward. It also discussed the implementation of the billing and metering aspects of the Energy Services Directive.

The Government’s response to the consultation was published on 29th April 2008