Could people be left without heating and hot water when the RTS signal disappears?

The percentages of smart meter installations in households across Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles is currently 12%, 10% and 16% respectively.

By Robert Leslie

On Sunday 9^th October 2011, The Guardian website carried a story under the headline ‘Radio 4’s long wave goodbye’, which described how the ‘last pair of valve transmitters’ would signal the end of 198kHz long wave, home of the BBC’s Test Match Special and Today in Parliament.

There was no mention of the Radio Teleswitch (RTS) in an article that described how a handful of specially crafted glass valves, each measuring one metre high, were all that was stopping these programmes going suddenly and permanently off air.

At the time it was reported that the BBC had bought up the entire stock of these valves – reportedly fewer than ten in the world – that had lifespans of between one and ten years.

When one of the last two valves blows, this will bring an end to the RTS signal that operates storage heaters and hot water cylinders in over 900,000 households across some urban but also many rural and island areas of Scotland, as well as other areas of the UK.

This is why a switch-off of the signal is now planned for the end of June 2025 – having been extended several times since an initial 2016 consultation on its future.

Better to plan than wait for a potential catastrophe, surely.

However, folk relying on this near-obsolete technology, introduced in the mid-1980s to manage the load on the electricity network, are still worrying about what will happen to their heating and hot water when the signal disappears. The replacement of meters is not currently progressing at anywhere near the pace required to meet the deadline.

Uncertainty over the impact if the RTS meters in homes are not able to be replaced by smart meters in time for the switch-off is now exercising minds within the energy supply companies responsible for the meters, as well as at energy regulator Ofgem.

While an RTS Taskforce, including energy suppliers, Energy UK, Ofgem, Smart Energy GB, DNOs and government, has set out a Call to Action aimed at rapidly increasing the pace and number of RTS upgrades, it hasn’t yet fully translated into reality.

An OHAL tenant was also able to tell the Ofgem team the story of how her RTS replacement hadn’t been able to go ahead due to lack of signal, and how she felt anxious about the lack of an alternative solution for her situation.

It was also concerning that the engineer that had visited her home in South Ronaldsay, one of Orkney’s islands connected to the Orkney mainland by the Churchill Barriers, had been on Graemsay, an island requiring a ferry crossing, to replace one meter the day before, and was due to visit Flotta the next day. He didn’t realise this was another island requiring a ferry crossing until the tenant told him. This lack of co-ordination won’t help increase the number of RTS meters being replaced.

There is also concern that the functionality of heating and hot water will not be fully addressed during meter replacement visits.

Charlotte Friel from Ofgem was able to give some assurances around the kind of work that would happen in the run up to the RTS signal disappearing, including testing of the impacts of switching off, which she said would be carried out in limited areas for short periods of time.

However, Tim Jarvis admitted that there was more to do on the RTS issue, and he would be taking the messages he had heard in Orkney to the heads of the relevant supply companies.

While this is encouraging to an extent, it all feels a bit ‘too little, too late’ if you consider that the ending of the signal was being flagged as early as 2011.

As a member of what is now the Rural and Islands Fuel Poverty Action Group, formerly covering only the Highlands and Islands, I have been involved in discussing the RTS issue for too long, and members share frustration at the lack of urgency from the companies responsible for replacing the meters. Offers of engagement from housing associations have to date largely been ignored.

There has been a significant amount of heel-dragging, and it feels like companies are having to be dragged kicking and screaming by the regulator to engage with customers who could be left without heating and hot water if they don’t get a new meter in time.

In terms of the effect on fuel poverty, there are clear issues if households are left with technology that isn’t working fully and may result in much higher bills if it starts charging storage heaters and hot water cylinders without any control.

But even when meter switches are successful, households are losing of flexibility provided by Total Heating Total Control (THTC) – a ‘type of use’ tariff that gives folk the ability to boost heating and hot water on the ‘heating rate’ (we won’t call it the cheap rate any longer) 24 hours a day.

For example. if they get the Economy 10 tariff, delivering ten hours of cheaper electricity during three periods each day, additional heating and hot water outwith these periods will come at the dearer day rate.

And if Economy 10 is the main replacement, it is in the words of Donnie Mackay, former energy advisor at Lochalsh and Skye Housing Association, it continues to ‘prejudice market access’, with not enough competition across suppliers.

Billing and debt issues are also likely to emerge with the transition of so many accounts to new tariffs, and, as Donnie says, ‘these will be as complex to deal with as the technical challenges are’.

There is a real concern that many credit accounts will be inaccurate through ongoing misguided estimates of use due to a lack of systematic meter readings since the 2020 pandemic.

The other factor will be with THTC on prepayment meters – many of those who left SSE are on “free heat” with new suppliers who don’t understand the meter.

A major cost issue is the potential lack of access to flexible tariffs once more of these become available, as these would require presence of a smart meter.

Although these are now being installed in higher numbers in Orkney – replacing RTS meters is part of the smart meter rollout and shouldn’t cost householders anything extra – the percentages of smart meter installations in households across Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles is currently 12%, 10% and 16% respectively.

This means that rural off-gas Scotland, the very areas that could have best access to excess green electricity generation and affordable time-of-use tariffs, have the least access to the infrastructure through which to do so.

It seems perverse that areas like Orkney will have many new power lines, hosting even more renewable energy, yet not have working smart meters to utilise any potential benefits.

So, where the replacement of these RTS meters could have been heralded as an opportunity for households off the mains gas grid to benefit from new more flexible and cheaper electricity tariffs – especially cheaper heat – it feels like we have yet again been left behind in the energy transition.

Residents in rural and island areas that are hosting major renewable generation, where owners are being paid handsomely for periods of constraint, are being punished rather than rewarded for having the most decarbonised electricity in the UK.

Of course, while we in rural areas have been lobbying hard on this issue, we also realise that as many Scottish homes in urban areas will be affected by the RTS shutdown as in rural areas, predominantly in high-rise blocks where gas heating wasn’t an option.

So, while the disappearing long wave radio signal may have meant loss of test match coverage for some, for those relying on the RTS signal for heating and hot water the current uncertainty is just not cricket.

This article was first published in EAS Energy Review Conference 2024, The journal of Energy Action Scotland.