The increasing implementation of favorable government policies in several countries is fueling the installation of smart meters. As part of their clean energy initiatives, the governments of many countries have enacted legislations that make the installation of smart meters mandatory. For example, in February 2020, EESL, which is state-owned company based in India, announced that it has completed the installation of one million smart meters across the country, under the Indian Government’s Smart Meter National Programme.
Furthermore, the company aims to install 250 million smart meters in the country over the next few years. Similarly, state-owned Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), in collaboration with the Alfanar Group, signed contracts worth $2.53 billion for a comprehensive project aimed at installing 10 million smart meters in Saudi Arabia before March 2021. Moreover, the companies aim to complete the project by March 2023. These programs and initiatives are positively impacting the sales of smart meters.
Read Full Report: Smart Meters Market Revenue Estimation and Growth Forecast Report
Besides the aforementioned factors, the two-way communication characteristics of smart meters are also fueling their popularity across the world. Smart meters support the bi-directional flow of information. They are installed at the premises of end users for collecting information on power usage by all appliances and devices at regular intervals with the help of a local area network (LAN). The local data aggregators collect the data generated from individual smart meters with the help of neighborhood area networks (NANs).
This data is then transmitted to the utility center via a wide area network (WAN). Similarly, the utility center has the ability to send signals, information, or commands to the smart meters installed at the premises of end users, when required. Moreover, smart meters enable the automation of major appliances such as washing machines. Besides these factors, the increasing focus on smart grids is also positively impacting the demand for smart meters across the world.
This is subsequently fueling the expansion of the global smart meters market. As a result, the value of the market is predicted to grow from $13.1 billion in 2019 to $20.0 billion by 2030. Furthermore, the market will advance at a CAGR of 4.9% between 2020 and 2030. Depending on meter type, the market is divided into electric meter, gas meter, and water meter categories. Amongst these, the water meter category will demonstrate the fastest growth in the forthcoming years.
This is ascribed to the surging usage of water meters by consumers for keeping track of their water consumption, monitoring pressure, wastage, and leakage with the help of the inbuilt sensors, and carrying out data analysis for optimizing their water usage. When application is taken into consideration, the smart meters market is classified into residential, commercial, water utilities, and industrial. Out of these, the residential category dominated the market from 2014 to 2019.
This trend is expected to continue in the coming years as well, due to the fact that the requirement for smart meters is the highest in residential applications. Moreover, residential units such as autonomous houses and suburban/urban apartments are the biggest end users of smart meters around the world. Globally, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region will dominate the smart meters market in the upcoming years, as per the estimates of the market research company, P&S Intelligence.
Hence, it is clear that the demand for smart meters will surge all over the world in the coming years, primarily because of the increasing implementation of favorable government policies, rising focus on smart grids, and the growing public awareness about energy conservation.
