Energy company E.ON pushes for mandatory smart meters in German households

Germany’s largest electricity retailer, E.ON, has announced its support for the mandatory installation of electricity smart meters in all homes. “If I had one wish, it would be a mandatory rollout of smart meters in Germany,” the company’s chief operating officer, Marc Spieker, told news agency dpa in an article published by WirtschaftsWoche.

Currently, network operators in the country are only obliged to upgrade a customer’s meter under certain conditions, such as when the household installs a solar panel or a heat pump. This in seen as one reason why Germany is lagging behind many other European countries in the rollout of smart metering devices. 

Smart meters are devices that can record how much electricity is used and when in real-time. They transmit this data to power providers, thus enabling consumers to get charged accordingly when they use electricity when it is abundant and therefore cheap. They are a perquisite for dynamic electricity tariffs, which should in turn better align the intermittent nature of renewable electricity generation with its use.

Many European countries have already retrofitted most of their households with the devices, yet in the EU’s largest economy, just under four percent of households had a smart meter at the end of September 2025 – equivalent to two million devices, WirtschaftsWoche reported. “It's too slow and far too lax,” said Spieker. “It's not right that grid operators who are still not making progress are not simply being sanctioned.”

In the case of future mandatory smart meter installation, the E.ON manager suggested that grid operators who are too slow should lose the right to replace meters in their network area after one year, with other companies taking over. According to its own figures, the company had installed almost one million devices in Germany by the end of 2025. 

Hundreds of energy companies in Germany are facing fines for failing to meet mandatory smart meter quotas, with 85 percent of metering point operators below legal installation requirements, according to a report published by the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in January.