Smart meter

A smart meter measures electricity for billing and talks to the network operator's remote reading system in both directions. Polish law calls it a remote-read meter (licznik zdalnego odczytu): a measuring instrument for electricity and its billing, equipped with communication with the remote reading system. The remote reading system collects measurement data and the events the meter records, and sends commands back to it.

The Polish metering regulation of 2022 sets what that means in practice. The operator reads each meter at least once a day, communication runs both ways, and the operator can switch supply on and off remotely or change the 15-minute power limit on a directly connected meter. Meters record a load profile of active and reactive energy every 15 minutes; for category A meters with instrument transformers the period can be set from 1 to 60 minutes. Data collection has a service level: at least 90% of a day's data by 09:00 the next day, 94% by noon on day three and 96% by midnight on day seven.

Smart meter data reaches software by two separate paths. The validated path goes from the meter to the operator's remote reading system and on to the central market data hub; settlement, billing and suppliers use it. The second path is a local communication interface on the meter, which gives the customer's own devices non-validated data in near real time: imported and exported energy, instantaneous active power, power limit settings, the meter serial number and a timestamp. The regulation requires that local link to be encrypted.

At EU level, Article 20 of Directive (EU) 2019/944 requires smart metering systems to make validated historical consumption data and non-validated near-real-time data available to the customer, and to allow metering and settlement at the same time resolution as the imbalance settlement period. Article 53 of the balancing guideline (EU) 2017/2195 sets that period at 15 minutes. Article 23 of the Directive requires the parties that manage data to give any eligible party access to the customer's data.

In Poland, Article 11t of the Energy Law sets the rollout. Distribution operators must install remote-read meters at no less than 80% of end-user metering points connected at up to 1 kV without instrument transformers, including 80% of households, by December 31, 2028, with interim targets of 15% by the end of 2023, 35% by the end of 2025 and 65% by the end of 2027. A customer may ask the operator to install a remote-read meter (within 4 months) and to enable communication with the customer's own devices (within 2 months), if those devices meet the regulation's requirements. Meters installed before July 4, 2019 must be brought up to the new requirements by July 4, 2031.

Article 11u requires the operator to send the measurement data to the central energy market information system, CSIRE. Commands to a meter go through CSIRE as well, on request of the transmission operator, the supplier, the customer or a party the customer authorizes. CSIRE is run by the energy market information operator (OIRE), and under Article 11y that role belongs to the transmission system operator, PSE. PSE launched CSIRE on July 1, 2025.

A product built on smart meter data, from a prosumer app to a flexibility platform, has to deal with the following:

• The metering point ID is the main key. In Poland that is the PPE number (punkt poboru energii); contracts, data imports, cooperative settlement and flexibility groups all hang on it.
• Validated and near-real-time data are different datasets with different delays and accuracy. Keep both, label which one a figure comes from, and reconcile them.
• Data changes after the fact. Under Article 11w the operator sets substitute values when a reading is missing and corrected values when it was wrong, so storage must keep versions and recalculate dependent figures.
• Intervals are stored with UTC timestamps, because a local day has 92 or 100 quarter-hours when the clocks change, the same trap described for prices in the day-ahead market entry.
• Access to a customer's data needs that customer's authorization, and the authorization has to be stored and checked.
• Billing data is too slow for control. A battery or EMS reacts to the meter's local interface or to its own sub-meter, and the billing data is used afterward to check the result.
• Meter values are usually identified by OBIS codes, and the Polish regulation refers to the IEC 62056 series (PN-EN 62056-21) for meter communication. Map the codes once and keep import and export in separate codes.

In Zeronest's platform the homeowner app also works with no solar panels at all, running on meter data alone. The installer panel identifies each installation's meter by its PPE number, and the cooperative module settles energy on two levels, the whole cooperative and each metering point. The demand response module groups metering points before it dispatches an event. Device readings are mapped to OBIS codes; in 2024 we split combined import and export codes into separate ones, and alerts are generated from OBIS values. A 2025 defect showed the time-zone risk: after the switch to summer time on March 30, 2025, statistics, spot prices and device charts from before that date displayed incorrectly until the time handling was fixed. Installers can export the data as CSV at 15-minute or hourly granularity.