Santiago's Suspended Smart Electricity Meter Rollout
Electricity in Santiago is distributed by Enel Distribucion, a private concession covering 33 comunas of the Metropolitan Region and more than two million customers. A technical standard issued by the Comision Nacional de Energia in December 2017 obliged distributors to replace every household meter with a remotely read device, reaching full coverage by 2025. Ley 21.076, published in February 2018, had already transferred ownership of meters and connections from customers to the distributors; a tariff decree in September 2018 then let the companies recover the cost through the regulated tariff. Households would pay, over years, for a device they no longer owned. CIPER reported in March 2019 that more than 250,000 meters were already installed in Santiago and that the national bill would reach about US$1,000 million. The backlash was immediate. On 29 April 2019 the energy minister made replacement voluntary and ordered distributors to refund what they had charged. In October 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that refund unlawful, holding that a tariff decree cannot be rewritten by administrative act. Mandatory replacement has not resumed. A bill obliging distributors to install meters at their own cost cleared a Chamber committee in January 2026.
More than 250,000 meters were installed in Enel's Santiago concession before the stop (CIPER, March 2019), against roughly 6 million targeted nationally for 2025. The Comision Nacional de Energia set a regulated unit price of US$132, about CLP 87,500, per meter, and CIPER put the national programme at about US$1,000 million over seven years. A Senate committee was told in March 2019 that the surcharge would stay under 1% of a bill, roughly CLP 200 to 300 per billing cycle (Senado de Chile). Enel's own estimate of the refund owed was about CLP 1,000 per average residential customer, covering September 2018 to July 2019 and credited from 1 September 2019 (Enel, reported by T13, La Tercera, CNN Chile and BioBioChile). Sector sources put the industry-wide refund at about US$350 million (La Tercera, October 2020). The 2025 full-coverage target passed unmet; the government's current estimate for a restart is about US$3,000 million.
🎓 Lesson
The sums were trivial and the politics were not. Households were asked for a few hundred pesos a month, but for an asset that a law had just moved out of their hands into the distributor's. Chile lost seven years of metering on a question of ownership rather than one of technology or price, and is still legislating a way back.
Evidence📰 Media
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Costabout US$1,000M projected nationwide (2019); about US$3,000M current government estimate for a restart
FundingEnel Distribucion, recovered through the regulated distribution tariff until the charge was suspended in April 2019
Sources
↗ Ministerio de Energia — minister confirms voluntary replacement and refundsFetched. Primary. Dates the suspension to 29 April 2019 and names Minister Susana Jimenez; establishes that a ministerial decision, not a court or the Contraloria, stopped the mandatory rollout, that charges were suspended and refunded in full, and that installation would continue only on express customer request. Carries no figures on meters installed or amounts refunded.
↗ CIPER Chile — new smart meters: the US$1,000 million cost falls on customersFetched. Investigative report of 1 March 2019 that set off the backlash. Sole source for the Santiago-specific figure of more than 250,000 meters already installed by Enel Distribucion, and for the CNE unit price of US$132 (CLP 87,500), the US$1,000 million national total, the seven-year horizon to 2025, the ~6 million devices, and the fact that meters would be the distributor's property while customers paid through tariffs from September 2018.
↗ Ley 21.076 — Biblioteca del Congreso NacionalThe instrument itself. Published in the Diario Oficial on 19 February 2018; transferred ownership of meters and connections to the distribution company. Cited for the legal fact of the ownership transfer, which is the pivot of the whole episode and runs opposite to the usual direction of such reforms.
↗ Comision Nacional de Energia — technical standards registerRegulator's own register. Anchors the obligation to the Norma Tecnica de Calidad de Servicio para Sistemas de Distribucion of 18 December 2017 (systems of measurement, monitoring and control; 100% coverage by 2025) and its later replacement by CNE Resolucion Exenta 209/210 of 3 May 2024, which rebuilt the framework after the collapse.
↗ Senado de Chile — committee session on smart meter chargesFetched. Institutional record, March 2019. Supports the per-household surcharge of roughly CLP 200 to 300 per billing cycle and under 1% of a bill, the seven-year replacement horizon for over 6 million meters, and preliminary installations in the Metropolitan Region. Also records Senator Letelier's statement that legislators had been told there would be no tariff effect.
↗ La Tercera / Pulso — Supreme Court declares the refund unlawfulFetched. Reported 30 October 2020. Establishes that the court struck down the refund, not the meters: a tariff decree can only be changed by unanimous agreement between companies and the CNE plus a new decree. Source for the ~US$350 million sector estimate and for the ambiguity over whether the ruling binds only the claimant, Cooperativa Regional Electrica Llanquihue (Third Chamber, rol 50.520-2020, on SEC Oficio 15.699 of July 2019).
↗ T13 — Enel estimates the refund at about CLP 1,000 per customerNOT fetched directly; verified through search results, where La Tercera, CNN Chile and BioBioChile carry the same Enel figure at headline level (1-2 August 2019). Operator-reported, hence the media evidence grade. A more precise figure of about CLP 961 plus interest, for September 2018 to July 2019 credited from 1 September 2019, appears in the same reporting but could not be confirmed sentence-level, so the entry uses the rounded CLP 1,000 that four outlets state outright.
↗ El Mostrador — smart meters and Chile's electrical modernisationFetched. Commentary of 11 March 2024 confirming the programme never restarted: the 2018 attempt failed once costs were passed to consumers, and nearly six years on there has been no significant progress, leaving Chile behind Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Colombia. The basis for the failed outcome grade.
↗ BioBioChile — Chamber commission backs free smart meter replacementFetched. 26 January 2026, the currency check. The Chamber's Mining and Energy Commission unanimously approved a bill (motion Boletin 17.850-08, filed September 2025) obliging distributors to install remote meters at no cost to final customers, with a government cost estimate of about US$3,000 million. Confirms the matter is unresolved rather than closed, which is why status is suspended and yearEnd null.
↗ Vasquez et al., 'The Erratic Implementation of Measuring, Monitoring and Control System (MMCS) in Chile: The crisis on smart meters', Energy Reports 6 (2020)Peer-reviewed academic account of the episode. ScienceDirect returned HTTP 403 and the ADS record rendered empty, so it could not be read sentence-level and supports nothing in the snippet or impact. Recorded here because its abstract, as surfaced in search, describes the crisis as one contributing element of the October 2019 social outburst and states that the pre-Decreto 5T position was restored in fact rather than by legislative act. That estallido link is deliberately kept out of the entry text until the paper can be read directly.
↗ Enel Distribucion — smart meter replacement processOperator page. Returned HTTP 503 on repeated attempts and is NOT relied upon. Search-surfaced text from it gives an undated 'over 200,000 installed' figure that conflicts with CIPER's dated 250,000; the undated figure was dropped rather than reconciled.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Santiago's Suspended Smart Electricity Meter Rollout” — Santiago, Chile. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/santiago-smart-meters-suspended/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
