I’m often asked to explain “Behind the Meter” (BtM). It’s a catch-all term that means different things depending on whether you sit with a supplier, a network operator, a technology provider, or a trader. In this three-part series I’ll

• 1) Define Behind the Meter,
• 2) unpack the technical stack, and
• 3) look at the commercial and trading implications.

1) Definitions and a brief history

Behind the Meter (BtM) describes generation, storage, or flexible demand that sits on the customer side of the billing meter. The “meter” here is the settlement/billing point used to measure imports and exports for a home or business.

A useful contrast is Front of Meter (FoM): assets connected at transmission or distribution level that are visible as first-order resources to the system operator and market arrangements. In Great Britain (GB) that includes large generators and BMUs (Balancing Mechanism Units) providing balancing energy, and a wide range of ancillary services providers (including grid-scale batteries) delivering frequency response, reserve, and other system services.

BtM assets can still affect the grid materially, but they‘re not presented to the system operator as dispatchable units. They can be pooled together into one large virtual asset in a process known as aggregation. Historically, BtM capacity started to be utilised (at scale) with rooftop solar and large industrial processes that could be switched on or off, or turned down, to provide extra capacity to the grid. It has moved rapidly into smart meters, home energy management systems (HEMS), EV smart charging, heat pumps, and residential or SME batteries – and then into aggregated control via virtual power plants (VPPs). 

2) Why is BtM a big deal right now?

Policy and net-zero pressures. Most markets in developed countries are pushing hard on decarbonisation. The UK’s system operator has been explicit that consumer flexibility is a serious requirement and it is part of the resource stack needed to run a low-carbon system reliably: see Future Energy Scenarios (FES). (NESO’s Demand Flexibility Service reports give a view of how this is being operationalised).

Intermittency and system operability. Wind and solar place new requirements on balancing and network management. Batteries help, but they don’t eliminate the need for flexible demand and local constraint management – particularly on distribution networks, where many of these devices connect.

Scale. A single EV charger or heat pump is small. However, multiplied across millions of homes and SMEs, they become system-relevant. In GB, total electricity demand in 2024 was about 319 TWh and domestic consumption about 94.4 TWh (around 30% of total). Being able to control or shift some of that demand could have huge benefits.

3) The concept

In practice, BtM aggregation only scales when three things line up:

• Technical feasibility: secure control, adequate telemetry, reliable comms, and credible measurement & verification.
• Regulatory design: clear routes to market for participants, and frameworks to allocate imbalance and performance risk sensibly.
• Commercial incentives: the value created has to be large enough to pay for devices, integration, customer acquisition, and ongoing operations.

Managing BtM assets can be successful as an end-to-end system when we conceptualise the whole stack: customer proposition → device control → grid/market product → settlement and cash.

4) Some interesting stats:

• GB smart meter penetration: around 66% of meters are smart/advanced, with about 34 million operating in smart mode 
• GB demand flexibility (winter 2022/23): 1.6 million households and businesses participated, shifting/saving over 3.3 GWh (NESO DFS). 
• German solar scale: installed solar capacity >100 GW in 2025 
• German VPP scale: Next Kraftwerke has reported passing 10,000 MW of aggregated capacity (company announcement; also reflected in sector reporting).
• Australia: small scale energy generation: over 4 million units (Clean Energy Council).

In part 2 of this series I’ll look at how the whole stack hangs together (devices → meters → aggregators/VPPs → DSOs/TSOs/markets), and where the integration work is.