Share of active budget meters in electricity

Budget meters are meters for energy (electricity and gas) that operate in a card-based prepayment mode. The customer must recharge the card of his budget meter before using the energy. This type of meter is most often placed at the request of the energy supplier following a default by the customer. It may also be at the request of the CPAS or expressly of the client, but these two cases are much less frequent. Once the customer has discharged the debt related to the energy carrier concerned, he can request the deactivation of the budget meter, i.e. revert to a traditional billing method where payment is made via down payment invoices every month. The presence of an active budget meter is a good indicator of energy poverty, as its use very often results from financial difficulties related to the payment of energy bills. With the placement of the first smart meters in 2020, they have been integrated into the statistics if their prepayment functionality is activated following a payment default, the request of a CPAS or the customer himself. The indicators listed here are the share of active budget meters in relation to the number of active residential EAN (European Article Numbering) codes, for the energy in question (one indicator for electricity and another for gas). The 18-digit EAN code identifies each connection to the electricity or natural gas network. In order to calculate this proportion, we took the number of active budget meters from the numerator. It should be noted that we have not taken into account all installed budget meters (active or inactive) in order not to count budget meters that have been deactivated following a move, or following a deactivation request from a household that has cleared its debts. Note that both budget meters with a power limiter (only in electricity and intended for protected customers, e.g. social integration income recipients) and budget meters without a power limiter are counted. In order to obtain the number of households supplied with electricity or gas, we used the number of active residential EAN codes in the denominator. It should be noted that we did not take into consideration all the meters active in the municipality in order not to count the exclusive night meters or the control meters. There is only one EAN code per network connection point, but there may be multiple meters on that connection. Finally, keeping only residential EAN codes is consistent with the fact that only residential customers can use a budget meter. The budget meter is not intended for business customers (companies, institutions, self-employed persons, property administrators, etc.). Regarding the share of gas active budget meters, entities for which there are very few gas residential customers (less than 300 gas active residential EAN codes) are not represented, considering that the low number of gas users does not allow for sufficiently representative data. In addition, we also publish a third indicator that shows the share of households using the gas network. This indicator relates the number of residential gas active EAN codes to the number of residential electricity active EAN codes. We consider that the number of residential EAN codes active in electricity is a measure of the number of households in the municipality. Indeed, it can be assumed that all households have, a priori, an electricity meter, but not all of them have a gas meter. The report makes it possible to estimate the deployment and use of the gas network by households in the various municipalities of Wallonia. For each entity, it shows to what proportion of households the indicator ‘share of gas budget meters’ refers – the rest of households not using the gas network.