Umair Ejaz, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Tuxera poses the question of what’s causing a breakdown in data for smart meters
In today’s digitalised energy landscape, data is the backbone of grid intelligence. From real-time pricing and demand-side management to decarbonisation targets and predictive maintenance, utility companies depend on accurate, uninterrupted data from smart meters. These devices open the data window to smart logging consumption patterns, transmitting diagnostics, and enabling granular insight for both consumers and operators.
Yet across global rollouts, millions of smart meters are underperforming due to persistent issues with data accuracy and integrity. This is fast emerging as a business-critical challenge triggering billing disputes, compliance failures, reputational damage, and mounting operational costs.
The risk of under-the-radar inaccurate data
Unlike a complete device failure, inaccurate or incomplete data doesn’t always raise immediate red flags. Instead, the impact builds silently over time with missed logs and delayed transmissions until it starts being a real problem.
Data inaccuracy means consumption analytics and demand forecasting become skewed and billing systems may issue incorrect invoices. Customers start noticing and grow frustrated with unexplained costs or erratic service. Energy providers begin to feel the effects of operational and reputational damage. Smart meter manufacturers see an influx of reported errors/failures from the field and warranty claims from utilities.
Smart energy promises pricing and environmental benefits such as dynamic tariffs, better-managed carbon footprints, distributed energy resources, and renewables at scale. However, unreliable data becomes a foundational risk to the smart energy era.
What’s causing the data breakdown?
Today’s smart meters operate under pressure, recording and transmitting large volumes of data at high frequencies. Each operation, from writing usage data to storing logs and managing firmware updates, takes a toll on the internal flash memory that stores this information. As a result, smart meters often fail within seven years of operation due to flash wear.
Flash memory, particularly NAND, has a finite number of write/erase cycles. In addition, there are background operations that add extra strain to the flash memory, like garbage collection. In flash memory, data updates create obsolete blocks that accumulate over time, requiring reclamation through garbage collection to free up space and maintain storage efficiency. Without software specifically designed to handle these cycles efficiently, memory degrades with errors and data loss increasing.
Additionally, sudden power outages or voltage fluctuations, which are common in real-world grid environments, can disrupt write processes, leading to partial or corrupted data. If the system lacks resilience, it may not detect or recover from such events, and data inaccuracy starts taking hold.
The business impact of inaccurate data
When smart meter data fails to deliver complete accuracy and continuity, utility companies start suffering the implications across operations, customer trust, and reputation.
One of the most immediate consequences is revenue loss. When usage data is incomplete or inaccurate, customers are charged incorrectly, resulting in disputes that require manual intervention, refunds, and in some cases, regulatory escalation. Over time, this erodes cash flow and increases administrative overhead while the influx of customer complaints leads to customer service delays and can accelerate churn in increasingly competitive energy markets.
In addition, there are regulatory implications with many national and regional authorities having established compliance thresholds for smart meter uptime and data accuracy. Falling short of these standards can trigger formal investigations, fines, or the need to replace underperforming meters ahead of schedule. These processes increase operational costs and attract public scrutiny.
Data inaccuracy also fuels inefficiencies in field operations. Often, faults linked to software-level memory degradation are misdiagnosed as hardware failures, leading to unnecessary technician callouts and device replacements. Given the smart meter replacement cost caused by flash or file systems is approximately £250-£350 per device, overall costs increase quite dramatically.
Finally, smart meter data plays a critical role in utilities’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting. Accurate usage data underpins carbon accounting, energy efficiency programmes, and progress towards climate targets. When data is compromised, ESG metrics become unreliable, threatening the credibility of sustainability commitments and investor confidence.
Ensuring data integrity by design
Smart metering systems are typically designed to be resilient to power outages through hardware, including additional power sources such as batteries, capacitors, backup or larger flash memory, etc. The software-level resilience through file systems is often overlooked.
However, the most impactful solutions come from better design at the software level that can deliver 100% data integrity. This includes embedding systems that are optimised for flash memory, can handle high-frequency logging, and can recover from more than 15,000 hard power-offs, reducing the risk of field failures and costly diagnostics. Software-level resilience can also optimise the hardware costs, delivering savings of 5-10% per meter, which can be significant if the meter order quantity is in six figures.
Flash-optimised systems reduce the chance of silent data corruption and keep performance stable over time without increasing memory capacity or device size. This means that industry players do not need to worry about increasing hardware costs or adding costly extra flash memory.
In addition, as smart meters run on resource-constrained embedded systems and low-footprint hardware and software components, adding additional memory is typically not an option for metering companies. Instead, they can boost data accuracy by optimising how the existing storage is managed with file systems that are designed with data integrity features while keeping the low footprint.
Safeguarding data and business value
As digitalisation continues and customer expectations rise, utilities and smart meter manufacturers must treat data accuracy as a core business function. Every missed or inaccurate data point poses a risk to billing, compliance, customer trust, and ultimately, revenue. For decision-makers across the energy value chain, this means re-evaluating how smart meter data is stored, transmitted, and protected.
Focusing on hardware and memory upgrades increases costs without solving the problem. Leveraging smarter and optimised embedded software that prioritises data resilience by design to deliver trustworthy insights from day one up to decades, addresses the challenge at its core, and future-proofs utilities’ operations and business model.
In the race to modernise energy infrastructure, the right software solutions deliver resilience and close the ‘data gap’ once and for all.
Umair Ejaz is a Senior Product Marketing Manager with over 10 years of experience in technical products and marketing. Umair specialises in bridging the gap between complex technology and real-world applications. His strength is translating technical embedded system details into clear, accessible insights that empower readers to tackle everyday challenges.
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