Ecotricity Explains: Smart meters for a greener Britain

When you have a smart meter, you’ll have an In-Home Display (IHD) too. This little handheld device provides your energy usage data in near real-time, giving you sight of your energy usage and how much it’s costing you. By keeping track of your energy usage, you can identify where and when you're using more energy and make changes accordingly, cutting down on not only wasted costs but also wasted energy.  

Smart meters send your meter readings across a secure, encrypted network to your energy supplier, giving them a clear picture of how much energy you’re using. This isn’t so that they can spy on you or see when you’re at home – this data is used to work out how much energy households and businesses across the UK need at a given time.  

Since their rollout, it’s estimated that the smart network, run by the Data Communications Company (DCC), is saving over a million tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. That’s around the same amount of CO2 as you’d save from taking a million cars off the road!  

With your meter sending readings to your supplier automatically, we won’t need to send out meter reading agents so often. We’ll still need to send them out to check your meter is running as expected, but by cutting down on these visits, we’ll cut a huge amount of transport emissions.