Ready, Set, Standardise: Accelerating Smart Meter Data Standards
The next five years will see unprecedented investment in smart metering across the water sector, with companies planning the installation of around 10.4 million smart meters by 2030 and increasing expectations on interoperability, data sharing and programme maturity. Smart metering has the potential to transform the water sector—unlocking better customer insight, improved demand management, faster leak detection, and smarter operational decision-making. But despite growing adoption, the sector still faces a major obstacle: data inconsistency.
Different systems, suppliers, formats, and governance approaches make it difficult to share, compare, and scale smart metering insights across organisations. Technical fragmentation and uncertainty around ownership, access, and standards are slowing innovation and limiting value; meaning that we are not realising the true benefits on smart metering on a national and global scale.
This sprint asks:
How might we enable water companies, suppliers, and partners to co-create and adopt shared smart metering data standards that overcome governance and technical barriers to allow benefits to be realised on a larger scale?
This sprint will bring together water companies, technology providers, regulators, and delivery partners to shape a more joined-up future for smart metering data.
Together, we will:
- Identify the key technical and governance barriers preventing standardisation
- Explore what a shared smart metering data framework could look like
- Define the critical data points, formats, and interoperability requirements needed across the sector
- Examine how common standards could accelerate innovation, efficiency, and customer outcomes
- Develop and refine prototype standards and test in real life scenarios
Participants will collaborate through structured design, mapping, and co-creation sessions to:
- Map the current smart metering data landscape and identify fragmentation points
- Review existing standards and interoperability approaches from within and beyond the water sector
- Co-design potential shared governance models for data ownership, access, and assurance
- Prototype concepts for common data structures, APIs, and integration approaches
- Develop pathways for piloting and scaling standards across organisations
By the end of the sprint, we aim to deliver:
- A draft framework for shared smart metering data standards
- Recommendations for overcoming technical and governance barriers
- A proposed model for cross-sector collaboration and stewardship
- Identified opportunities for pilot projects and standard testing
- A roadmap toward greater interoperability and sector-wide adoption
- Water companies, with improved interoperability and data usability
- Suppliers and technology providers, through clearer standards and reduced integration complexity
- Regulators, supporting more consistent and transparent sector innovation
- Customers, through improved services, faster issue resolution, and smarter water use insights
- The wider sector, by creating the foundations for scalable, collaborative digital transformation
Any questions: Laura Maxwell - laura.maxwell@nwl.co.uk