Non-equipped customers will be billed from summer 2025

The transition phase is coming to an end and people who refuse the Linky meter will have to pay for their consumption reading. The amount has not yet been set.

If you do not have or refuse to have a Linky meter at your home, the rules will soon change. People who are not equipped with one will be billed from summer 2025. “All customers not equipped with a communicating meter will be billed the cost of the residual reading”reminds franceinfo the gmanager of the public electricity distribution network. The principle of this billing is not new: it was taken by a 2022 deliberation of the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), which defined two phases for customers not equipped with Linky: before 2025, where it was necessary to send a consumption index at least once every 12 months to not be billed, and after 2025, where Enedis will bill, even in the case of self-reading, “the cost of the residual replacement”. According to Enedis, the CRE estimates “that from this period, users not yet equipped with Linky will be so by deliberate choice (except in isolated cases linked to a technical impossibility).”

This cost of the “residual relief” correspond “specific management of old generation meters” explain Enedis, which specifies however that the amount which will be collected has not yet been determined. It will be done by the CRE, which has the authority to set the tariffs for the use of public electricity networks (Turpe) by network managers every four years. And the next tariff (Turpe 7) will come into force from the summer of 2025. The manager adds that “the installation of the Linky meter is part of a European directive”, and complies with rules defined by law and specified in the Energy Code.

Users who do not have Linky meters and who send their own electricity readings are therefore affected by these new rules. Hence the surprise of some of these customers who did not pay any extra until now. France 3 Occitanie cites as an example a Toulouse resident, who takes his own reading of his consumption. The latter received a letter from Enedis informing him that he will be “systematically charged for collection fees”, by mid-2025, as long as it does not have a Linky meter. More than 37.2 million of these meters are installed in France.