A new milestone has been reached in the smart meter rollout, with 17 million installations since the programme began.
October 2021 saw 216,000 installations, while November 2021 saw 227,000 according to data from ElectraLink. However, this is 13% and 1% less than the same months last year, respectively.
Smart meter installation rates have been slipping downwards in recent months compared to the same months last year when the rollout was recovering from COVID-19 restrictions, ElectraLink said.
Smart meter installations were paused in March 2020 as a result of the nationwide lockdown, leading to domestic installations falling 15% in Q1 2020 compared with Q1 2019. Smart meter installations then started up again in June.
Installations remained over 200,000 for five months in a row in 2021, although this streak was broken in August when there were 189,000 installations.
Two further milestones were hit in October 2021, however. East England became the first region to reach 2 million cumulative installs, and London became the 10th region to reach 1 million cumulative installations.
As of November 2021, the regions with the most historic installations include East England with 2.04 million, the East Midlands with 1.7 million and Southern England with 1.72 million.
Overall, there have been 2.262 million smart meter installations compared to the 1.82 million from January-November 2020.