Rețele Electrice România to reach 2 million smart meters by the end of the year

Rețele Electrice România, part of PPC group of companies in Romania, announces that the total number of smart meters installed will reach approximately 2 million by the end of 2025, the highest volume reached by any electricity distribution operator in Romania.

“Smart meters are the basis of a digitized and resilient distribution network. They improve the interface with customers and allow the development of new market services, such as flexibility and aggregation of energy transit. They are also essential for the integration of decentralised generation and energy storage. Remote readings, switching suppliers and reconnecting without physical intervention reduce the carbon footprint, supporting sustainable energy consumption. By installing smart meters at each customer – consumer, producer or prosumer – we contribute to Romania’s energy transition.”, stated Mihai Pește, general manager of Rețele Electrice România.

In order to meet the set objectives, Rețele Electrice Romania continued to implement the installation of smart meters in the Banat, Dobrogea and Muntenia regions, according to the implementation calendar established by the National Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE) since 2015. The average monthly number of readings taken remotely in 2024 was around 1.5 million, thus helping to reduce the distribution operator’s carbon footprint.

This year, over 174,000 smart meters will be installed in the three regions served by Rețele Electrice Romania. The coverage of smart meters will reach 60% by the end of 2025 for customers in Bucharest and Ilfov and Giurgiu counties, over 50% for those in Banat (Timiș, Caraș-Severin, Hunedoara and Arad counties) and over 60% for those in Dobrogea (Constanta, Tulcea, Ialomita and Călărași), these representing the highest percentages of coverage in the entire country.

Smart meters are a modern generation of measuring devices, which gradually replace the old generation of meters, according to the plans approved by ANRE. This replacement does not entail additional costs for customers. When the smart meter is an integral part of a smart metering system and actively communicates with the central system, customers have many benefits, one of them being the fact that it is no longer necessary to transmit the index, and the bills reflect the real consumption.

According to the regulations in force, electricity distributors have the obligation to change old generation meters for new ones. In order to enjoy all the benefits offered by the smart meter, electricity users also have the legal obligation to allow access to the distribution operator’s representatives, if the meter is inside the home.

In addition, at the end of 2024, Rețele Electrice România implemented a modern IT platform that makes available to all electricity suppliers the consumption data of customers with smart meters in the 11 counties in its area of responsibility, so that suppliers can streamline their activity through access to updated measurement data.

The platform takes over the data of over 1.6 million smart meters and makes them available daily to suppliers, for the customers they have in their portfolio, as they become accessible in the Rețele Electrice România database. Suppliers thus have direct access to the data measured by electricity meters, in a primary format that can be easily processed, benefiting from flexibility in the analysis, management and processing of information.