Umair Ejaz, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Tuxera
Smart meters are central to digitalised energy systems, enabling accurate billing, real-time pricing, and data-driven decarbonisation strategies. Utilities, regulators, and customers rely on them to operate for up to 15 to 20 years, providing uninterrupted data that supports energy efficiency targets, carbon reduction plans, and energy consumption insights.
Yet, despite their importance, millions of smart meters globally are falling short due to persistent data accuracy issues. Unlike outright device failures, these inaccuracies often go unnoticed initially, quietly eroding operational efficiency, customer trust, and ESG reporting accuracy. For energy companies, maintaining data integrity is critical to enabling effective grid management, protecting revenue streams, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
The silent risks of data inaccuracies
Data inaccuracies in smart meters are often harder to detect than full device failures. These silent issues build over time, with missed logs and delayed data transmissions accumulating until they cause billing disputes, regulatory breaches, and operational inefficiencies.
Without accurate data, consumption analytics and forecasting models become skewed. Customers may receive incorrect bills, undermining trust and increasing service complaints, while utilities face avoidable administrative costs and reputational damage. For manufacturers, field errors linked to data issues translate into increased warranty claims and higher support burdens, damaging market confidence in smart meter rollouts.
What causes data degradation in smart meters?
Today’s smart meters operate under high data load conditions, continuously recording and transmitting usage data while managing event logs and firmware updates. This high-frequency operation puts significant stress on the internal NAND flash memory used in meters, which has a finite number of write/erase cycles. To manage this wear and ensure long-term reliability, smart meters typically rely on two embedded software components working in tandem: the flash controller and the file system. The flash controller handles how data is physically written to and managed on the memory, managing operations like wear leveling and bad block management. The file system organizes how data is structured, accessed, and maintained at the application level. Together, they form a coordinated software stack that improves data integrity, reduces memory stress, and significantly extends the operational life of the flash storage.
With every new data collection or update, the older obsolete data has to be cleared, otherwise the memory starts to wear out quickly. Without software optimised for flash management, these operations accelerate memory wear, leading to errors and silent data corruption. In many cases, standard file systems fail to manage these cycles efficiently, making meters prone to data degradation before their intended operational lifespan ends.
Additionally, the realities of energy distribution networks mean that power outages and voltage fluctuations are inevitable. These conditions can interrupt write processes, leading to corrupted or incomplete data. If smart meters lack the resilience to detect and recover from these events, inaccuracies can become embedded in utility datasets, undermining all subsequent analysis and reporting.
The financial and regulatory consequences of inaccuracy
Data inaccuracies have direct financial implications for energy companies. Incomplete or incorrect data can lead to revenue losses from inaccurate billing and refund requirements, while increasing customer service workloads due to disputes and complaints. Over time, these issues erode cash flow and increase the cost to serve, impacting operational budgets and efficiency metrics.
Regulatory compliance is also at risk. National and regional authorities impose strict data accuracy and uptime requirements for smart meters, with non-compliance triggering audits, fines, and, in some cases, enforced replacement programmes. Replacing meters can cost £250–£350 per unit, quickly escalating into significant unplanned expenditure when large fleets are affected.
Data accuracy is also essential for ESG reporting, underpinning carbon accounting and energy efficiency metrics. Inaccurate data threatens the credibility of sustainability claims, damaging investor confidence and affecting utilities’ ability to secure green financing for decarbonisation projects.
From a field operations perspective, software-related data failures are often mistaken for hardware faults, leading to unnecessary technician callouts and premature device replacements. This further drives up operational costs while reducing the efficiency of existing infrastructure investments.
Building resilience through software-level accuracy
While many smart meters include hardware features to provide some resilience during outages, such as backup batteries, the most impactful and cost-efficient improvements come from optimising the software layer.
Flash-aware, transactional copy-on-write file systems can ensure 100% data integrity even under high-frequency logging and repeated power interruptions, maintaining reliable operation over decades. These systems are designed to handle over 15,000 hard power-offs without data loss, enabling rapid system recovery and minimising downtime.
By managing memory wear efficiently, advanced file systems reduce the risk of silent data corruption without requiring additional flash capacity or larger devices. This is crucial for resource-constrained environments typical of smart meters, where space, power, and cost constraints limit hardware expansion. In many cases, software-led optimisation can deliver 5–10% savings per meter, providing substantial cost reductions across large-scale deployments while ensuring longevity and accuracy.
Protecting operations, revenue, and decarbonisation goals
Smart meter data integrity is foundational for energy companies seeking to improve operational efficiency, maintain revenue stability, and advance decarbonisation targets. Beyond billing accuracy and minimising replacement costs, reliable data plays a crucial role in managing energy distribution. Consumption data collected from meters is used not only to balance supply and demand in real time but also to inform future forecasts, shaping long-term planning for infrastructure investment and sustainability strategies. As this data is shared across the energy ecosystem, from utilities to regulators and grid operators, it becomes central to the coordination of energy flow, policy compliance, and readiness for emerging energy challenges.
Every inaccurate data point increases the risk of billing errors, non-compliance, and reputational damage while undermining the effectiveness of demand-side management and grid optimisation efforts. For energy companies, ensuring smart meter accuracy means reducing operational costs, avoiding unnecessary replacements, and maintaining the integrity of ESG reporting frameworks.
By focusing on embedded software resilience rather than costly hardware upgrades, utilities and manufacturers can address the root causes of data inaccuracies and extend the operational life of meters. This approach protects revenue, meets regulatory expectations, and aligns smart metering infrastructure with broader energy transition goals.
Closing the data gap for a smarter energy future
As energy systems become increasingly data-driven, the ability to maintain accurate, uninterrupted data from smart meters will be a key differentiator for utilities. Flash-optimised, resilient file systems are critical tools in closing the silent data gap, safeguarding business value, and enabling data-driven decision-making across the grid.
Smart meter accuracy is about building a smarter, more resilient, and efficient energy system. By addressing accuracy at the software level, energy utilities can support a low-carbon transition while ensuring operational reliability, financial stability, and customer trust.
In the drive to modernise energy infrastructure, accuracy is the foundation for success, and it starts with how data is managed and protected within every smart meter.
This article appeared in the September 2025 issue of Energy Manager magazine. Subscribe here.