Dive Brief:

• A report from Navigant Research predicts the smart meter market will pass the 53% global penetration mark by 2025, with the market size for smart meters forecast to grow to more than $10.7 billion.

• Adoption rates are slowing in the U.S., but several active projects are still under development with late adopters, the report noted. Major markets for growth include Spain, France and the United Kingdom. Japan is expected to complete the installation of approximately 80 million smart meters by 2025.

• Navigant found that barriers to wider adoption include policy roadblocks and negative consumer attitudes.

Dive Insight:

Navigant’s research suggests that we’ve largely passed a tipping point in adoption, however, with more meters than not expected to be smart within a decade. The result should be greater utility investment into demand-response strategies to reduce grid loads and incentivize end users for more efficient energy consumption, an effort the U.S. Department of Energy sees as a critical step for utility planners to ultimately balance energy supply and demand.

Smart meters are electronic devices used to measure energy consumed at the meter at regular intervals and relay that information to the utility for purposes including measuring resource consumption and billing. Electric meters have been in the market for more than a decade and are becoming more widely used. That's due in part to the federal government's investment in bolstering the nation's smart grid to better-manage resource consumption, as well as to the rise of sustainable building standards and certifications mandating energy-use measurement.