According to a new report from the research firm Berg Insight, 70 percent of electricity customers in Europe will have smart meters by 2022. At the end of 2014, there were 67.9 million smart electricity meters in the EU28+2 area, corresponding to a penetration rate of 24 percent.
By 2022, the installed base is projected to reach 199.7 million units. The vast majority of Europe’s smart electricity meters are today deployed in Italy, Spain and the Nordic countries. Over the coming 6–8 years, nationwide rollouts are planned in a number of additional countries in Western Europe, including France, the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland. Moreover, Berg Insight expects a significant uptake in several countries in Eastern Europe such as Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Estonia. The outlook for Germany is however less optimistic as several regulatory and technical issues still need to be resolved.
Berg Insight expects that the European smart electricity market will perform well in the coming years as a number of new and ongoing rollouts ramp up to full speed. During 2015, shipments of smart electricity meters are expected to grow by 30 percent to 8.4 million units, fuelled by new and expanded projects in France, the Netherlands and Norway. By 2017, Berg Insight also expects that the much delayed rollout in the UK will finally get up to speed.
Tobias Ryberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight, says:
“Based on the current time plans and projections, the European smart meter market will peak at 25–30 million units per year in the early 2020s. Besides greenfield deployments, we also expect to see next generation upgrades of the oldest existing systems in countries such as Italy.”
