A federal study has, for the first time, quantified the actual cost of digitizing Switzerland’s energy networks. Its findings point to a pivotal decision for district heating operators.
In May 2025, the Federal Office of Energy published a study commissioned from E-CUBE Strategy Consultants on smart metering options in the context of the opening of the gas market. I recommend reading it, even if your network doesn’t transport a single cubic meter of gas. Because behind the technical question of choosing between remote reading and smart meters lies a much broader—and much more urgent—lesson for all energy infrastructure operators in Switzerland.
The study’s key finding is starkly clear: in a fragmented market, the annual cost of smart metering ranges from 200 to 760 CHF per meter. With a centralized organization and economies of scale, that same cost drops to CHF 35–86. A factor of six. The authors’ conclusion leaves no room for doubt: the main economic issue lies not in the choice of technology, but in the ability to organize in a way that leverages economies of scale.
Let me ask a question that might seem out of place: Which telecom provider do you use for your corporate network? I’m willing to bet that you have a master agreement, that your provider is based in Switzerland or the EU, that you’ve read the data processing terms, and that you’ve negotiated a service continuity guarantee. You’ve done all this because your corporate connectivity is a critical piece of infrastructure.
Yet when it comes time to equip the substations in their heating networks, these same operators sometimes choose their IoT infrastructure the same way one chooses a mobile app: quickly, based on a quote, without asking the questions that really matter. Who hosts the data? Where is it located? What guarantees of reversibility are in place? What long-term technological dependencies are we committing to?
A connected infrastructure isn't just a tool. It's a strategic decision made once that shapes the next ten years.
The SFOE study confirms this in its own way: the current high costs in Switzerland are the result of a fragmented market in which each player has made its own decisions, without coordination, without economies of scale, and often without a long-term vision.
The study contains a sentence that I had to read twice. The authors note that the challenges posed by smart metering are “all the more significant given that the number of heating customers (heat pump transition, district heating) could decline.” This is a warning sign for the gas market. But it is explicitly identified as an opportunity for the district heating market.
Switzerland’s energy transition is leading to a clear trend: shrinking gas networks, expanding heating networks, and smart metering infrastructure that is becoming the nervous system of these networks’ management. CAD operators who build this infrastructure today—using reliable, interoperable solutions where data remains under their control—will be in a radically different position than those who improvise it in five years under regulatory pressure.
When a district heating operator seeks to digitize its substations, the evaluation criteria typically focus on price, functionality, and sometimes ease of integration. Rarely, however, do they consider two factors that are nonetheless critical: long-term operational reliability and control over the data generated.
Reliability first. The OFEN study documents operating costs of up to CHF 600 per node per year in fragmented configurations. These costs reflect the reality of undersized equipment, unstable connectivity, systems lacking fleet monitoring, and repeated corrective maintenance. A reliable IoT infrastructure is one that can guarantee data upload rates, detect anomalies before they become incidents, and maintain fleet consistency over a ten-year period.
Next, sovereignty. The data generated by a district heating network—load curves, supply and return temperatures, valve statuses, and consumption figures—are strategic assets. They enable the optimization of supply, the establishment of different contractual arrangements with heat producers, compliance with regulatory reporting requirements, and, in the future, the monetization of flexibility on energy markets. This data must remain under the operator’s control. Hosted in Switzerland or the EU. Exportable. Reversible.
Control over a network's data is not a luxury reserved for large operators. It is essential for operational resilience for any operator.
Operators who choose to digitize their networks today—using solutions built to last, based on a proven communications infrastructure, and featuring software designed to leverage data—are establishing a lead that will be hard to catch up with.
Those who wait will find themselves in a situation where their choices are constrained by regulations, delayed deployment costs, and the need to make up for lost ground. The six-fold cost reduction highlighted by the study is not an abstract promise; it is the result of a decision made early on, with the right architecture and the right partners.
The gas sector offers us one final lesson—perhaps the most valuable one: markets that fragment into local solutions, lacking coordination and a shared vision, always end up paying a higher price. District heating networks have a window of opportunity to avoid repeating this mistake. That window will not remain open indefinitely.
I must admit I was surprised when I read this report. In 32 pages of rigorous analysis of the costs of smart metering, the authors do not devote a single line to two questions that are nonetheless fundamental: how often is the data transmitted? And in what condition does it arrive?
This silence highlights a persistent blind spot in the debate over the digitization of energy networks. Reading a meter once a day technically constitutes “smart metering.” But a daily load curve without quality control, without outlier detection, and without addressing communication gaps is raw data that no one can use with confidence.
For a district heating network, temporal granularity isn’t just a technical detail—it determines whether you can detect a temperature deviation in time to prevent overheating, identify a customer whose usage patterns indicate a leak, or produce a reliable monthly energy report to present to your stakeholders. Data collected every 24 hours, without processing, does not allow for any of this.
The real question isn't how much it costs to collect data; it's how much usable data is worth. And those are two different things.
The energy data value chain consists of three stages, which the SFOE study condenses into a single process: collection, processing, and utilization. Processing—including validation, data cleansing, anomaly detection, and contextual enrichment—is precisely what transforms a stream of measurements into actionable insights. It is also, it must be said, what justifies investing in a software platform that goes beyond a simple remote meter reading module.
Operators who choose their IoT infrastructure based solely on the cost of data collection are overlooking the layer that gives value to everything else. It’s a bit like evaluating a medical monitoring system based solely on the price of the sensor, without considering the ability to interpret the signals.
Link to the full study:https://www.bfe.admin.ch/bfe/fr/home/approvisionnement/approvisionnement-en-gaz/loi-sur-approvisionnement-en-gaz.html
Maël Perret - CEO
