At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more than 10 years given the investment the government is putting in. (I think roll-out started like 7 years ago and is expected to be finished around 2030 in Belgium.)

Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.

>As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.

>I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.

The core problem is that these devices are garbage, and nobody cares. I don't mean that scornfully, I'm saying these devices are way over-provisioned and yet are unreliable anyway because they are very carelessly designed, and nobody cares because 1) they have no economic incentive to care, and 2) in the software world it's normal for cheap devices to fail within 10 years, and the people who refuse to accept this norm have no recourse except building their own piece of electronics (i.e. take up a hobby).

Demanding they provide the data 'in a standard format' lets us put lipstick on the pig, it doesn't actually solve the core problem of the device being a piece of shit.

In the UK, there are three (or four, depending on how you count them) types of device associated with smart meters.

Electricity meters are designed to last, and contain a radio that lets them communicate use to the distributor. What type of radio depends on where in the country you are.

The Gas meter is battery powered, and tries to send data to the electricity meter every half hour, over Zigbee. This works better for some than for others.

Then there's the in-home display, you get one with the meter but it's not required for reporting -- it's purely a display. At some point between the meter being installed and us moving in the one that goes with our house went walkabout, so we don't have one. Except we actually sort-of have two: our supplier makes a small box (with an ESP32 in it) that sends them near-realtime data (and also, happily, completes the otherwise-unreliable Zigbee mesh because the junk I have in the garage blocks the signal) and before that arrived I got a Hildebrand Glow, which talks MQTT to my Home Assistant.

The electricity meter receives the current price if it's a normal non-dynamic price, and the Glow can read that, but can also cope with Octopus Agile with its half-hourly pricing because it's able to fetch that data over the Internet.

The raw metering data isn't quite available to everyone in open formats, but there are procedures that one may go through to be able to receive data and at least one company then makes that data available to the consumer. It's not as fine-grained as the data available on the local Zigbee mesh, which is why those same companies also sell hardware that'll join said mesh. Unfortunately the mesh isn't open for use by arbitrary hardware.

You can also get random monitoring devices that sit on the consumer side of the meter and give you whatever capabilities you buy, and it sounds like the article is an example of one of those, rather than of a smart meter. The author would probably be better off with an actual smart meter, if that's an option.