Thousands of automatic power meters must be read manually

Up to 167,000 automatic power meters do not work properly, according to NRK. Thousands of them must be read manually.

Nearly 3.2 million power customers have had automatic power meters installed. This is stated by Statnett’s subsidiary Elhub to NRK.

167,000 of them do not provide data every hour, as they should. The power companies only get data from these customers once a month, but Elhub does not have good enough numbers to determine if all these meters are read visually.

The reason the meters have to be read manually is due to poor mobile coverage.

Only at the power company BKK, there are about 8,200 customers who pay for automatic meters, but have to read them themselves. There has been a decline of 300 customers since the fall of 2018.

– “The main reason is poor mobile coverage in either the residential or cabin area. But then we also need to have good enough mobile coverage right where the power cabinet is, and those are often in the basement. Therefore, the installers have to reach out to each residence, to look at the coverage and possibly mount a reinforced antenna at the power meter,” says Geir Holen in BKK to NRK.

Holen says he understands that customers would like to avoid submitting their electric meter readings each month, but points out that this is something Norwegians have been doing for years.

– “Of course we wish this was no the situation. This is something the customers have paid us for to drop, so we apologize,” he says.

© NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today