Greece’s grid operator frames its meter rollout as a customer-service upgrade. The numbers underneath it tell a story about solar and EVs outrunning the grid’s ability to see them.
HEDNO, Greece’s electricity distribution network operator, has now installed more than 1.7 million smart meters nationwide, up from roughly 85,000 in 2019, and is aiming to replace all 7.7 million low-voltage meters in the country — every household and business connection — by 2030. Officially, the pitch is about customer experience: accurate bills instead of estimates, faster outage detection, easier switching between electricity suppliers. HEDNO CEO Anastasios Manos has described the ambition in more structural terms, saying the goal is to move the grid “from reacting to events to anticipating them.” That framing is the more accurate one, and it points to a bigger project than metering alone.
The financial and industrial scale behind the rollout make clear this isn’t a routine hardware refresh. The first phase, covering 2024 to 2026, carries a total programme cost of €546 million, backed by a €150 million loan from the European Investment Bank and a further €273 million from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility. Three contractors are splitting delivery of 2.76 million next-generation meters under an eight-year framework agreement that could eventually scale to cover all 7.7 million units; Slovenia’s Iskraemeco holds the largest share, about 40%, supplying its IE.5 meters and a cloud-based head-end system. Spain’s ZIV Automation is manufacturing close to a million cellular NB-IoT meters, managed through a separate headend system from Itron, the US metering-technology group also running the Enterprise Edition meter-data-management platform that will ultimately oversee all 7.7 million connections. Itron’s contribution goes beyond data management: its Intelligent Edge Operating System is built as a platform for future grid applications, including an integration with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service — putting a named large-language-model product, not just “AI” in the abstract, inside Greece’s metering architecture.
What that AI layer is actually for becomes clearer against HEDNO’s own description of the problem it’s trying to solve. “Smart meters and sensors generate data, digital twins provide understanding of network topology and conditions, and AI can identify patterns, forecast demand and generation, detect faults and help prioritise maintenance,” Manos said — a chain that only works if the sensing layer, the meters, is dense enough to feed it. HEDNO is currently a participant in more than 21 EU-funded research projects covering flexibility markets, digital twins, cybersecurity and storage, work that depends on the same meter data the 2030 rollout is meant to produce at national scale.
The urgency behind all this is visible in what has happened to HEDNO’s network since 2018. Hosting capacity for renewable generation on its grid has grown from 3.8 GW to 9.1 GW today, and more than half of Greece’s total 17.1 GW of renewable capacity now connects through HEDNO rather than the separate high-voltage transmission operator — meaning most of the country’s solar and wind growth has landed directly on the distribution network the meters and AI tools are meant to manage. HEDNO says more than 75% of that connected renewable capacity can now be telecontrolled in real time, a capability that didn’t exist at scale a few years ago. Manos has reframed the operator’s core question accordingly: it is no longer primarily about how many megawatts of solar and wind can be connected, but “how many megawatts we can operate safely and efficiently” once they’re live and feeding power into the grid unpredictably. Electric vehicle charging is layered on top of that, with EV uptake identified alongside heat pumps, data centers and port electrification as a driver expected to push electricity demand up by roughly 24% by 2030 — demand that, unlike a traditional power plant’s output, arrives at unpredictable times and locations that only a metered, monitored network can actually see coming.
There is a more prosaic motive running alongside the technical one. Non-technical losses — mostly meter tampering and illegal connections — cost Greece an estimated €450 million a year, a bill that lands on compliant customers to the tune of roughly €60 annually per account; HEDNO says recent interventions, including smart-meter deployment in high-loss areas, have already cut that per-account figure closer to €50. That gives the rollout a near-term payback case independent of the longer-term grid-intelligence argument, which is likely why HEDNO’s own public messaging leans more heavily on billing accuracy and theft reduction than on grid physics.
The gap between ambition and progress is still wide. At roughly 1.7 million meters installed against a 7.7 million target, HEDNO is about 22% of the way to full national coverage after several years of EIB- and EU-backed investment, with reporting elsewhere putting current installation rates above 4,000 meters a day. The 2030 deadline leaves a little over three years to install the remaining three-quarters of the fleet — a pace that would need to accelerate substantially from here — while solar additions and EV sales are not waiting for the meters to catch up.
The rollout sits inside a broader capital push: HEDNO’s total investment for 2020–2025 exceeds €2.8 billion, more than triple the €800 million spent in the previous five-year period, with annual spending running at roughly €780–807 million in 2024 and 2025. Smart meters are one line item in that budget. Whether the AI and digital-twin tools riding on top of them are ready before Greece’s rooftops and driveways generate more variable load than the network below them was built to read is the harder question the billing-upgrade framing tends to leave out.
