Towards a Bass Diffusion Forecasting Approach for the UK's Smart Meter Roll-Out

Jake Francis Verma, Daniel L. Donaldson, I A Grant Wilson

Abstract: This paper explores the roll-out of smart meter technology with a particular focus on the UK. Many different approaches are used in the literature to analyse smart meter roll-outs. After assessing the policy analysis and propensity models, we propose a new approach to enable a forecast of the smart meter roll-out for England and Wales using the Bass diffusion model. We show that the Bass diffusion model describes Census output regions in England and Wales well, demonstrating the fit of the model to observed smart meter installations using a smart meter installation dataset from Electralink. We present fitted Bass diffusion curves for 3 regions in England and Wales, forecasting their cumulative adoption outwards by a period of 4 years. Finally, we propose further research questions for this smart meter installations dataset to better understand the success of the UK smart meter roll-out in quantitative terms.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/gridedge61154.2025.10887497