Share of households using the gas network

Budget meters are meters for energy (electricity and gas) that operate in a prepayment mode with card. The customer must recharge the card on his budget meter before using the energy. This type of meter is most often placed at the request of the energy supplier following a payment default by the customer. It may also be at the request of the CPAS or express customer, but these two cases are much less frequent. When the customer has cleared the debt related to the energy carrier concerned, he can request the deactivation of the budget meter, i.e. revert to a conventional invoicing method where payment is made via monthly down payment invoices. The presence of an active budget meter is a good indicator of energy poverty, as its use is very often the result of financial difficulties related to the payment of energy bills. With the placement of the first smart meters in 2020, these have been integrated into the statistics if their prepayment functionality is activated following a default payment, the request of a CPAS or the customer himself. The indicators listed here are the share of active budget meters in relation to the number of active residential EAN (European Article Numbering) codes, for energy considered (one indicator for electricity and another for gas). The 18-digit EAN code identifies each connection to the electricity or natural gas grid. In order to calculate this proportion, we took back to the numerator the number of active budget meters. Note that we have not taken into account all installed budget meters (active or inactive) in order not to account for budget meters that have been deactivated following a move, or following a request for deactivation from a household that has cleared its debts. Note that both budget meters with power limiters (only in electricity and for protected customers, e.g. beneficiaries of social integration income) and budget meters without power limitation are counted. In order to obtain the number of households supplied with electricity or gas, we have taken in the denominator the number of active residential EAN codes. Note that we have not taken into account all the active meters in the municipality in order not to count the exclusive counters overnight or the control meters. There is only one EAN code per connection point to the network, but there may be several meters on this connection. Finally, keeping only residential EAN codes is consistent with the fact that only residential customers can use a budget meter. The budget meter is not intended for professional clients (companies, institutions, independents, building trustees, etc.). As regards the share of active gas budget meters, entities for which there are very few residential gas customers (less than 300 residential EAN codes active in gas) are not represented, considering that the low number of gas users does not allow for sufficiently representative data. In addition, we also publish a third indicator that includes the share of households using the gas network. This indicator establishes the relationship between the number of residential EAN codes active in gas and the number of residential EAN codes active in electricity. We consider that the number of residential EAN codes active in electricity is a measure of the number of households in the municipality. Indeed, it can be assumed that all households have, a priori an electricity meter, but that they do not all have a gas meter. The report makes it possible to estimate the deployment and use of the gas network by households in the various municipalities of Wallonia. For each entity, it shows to what proportion of households the indicator “share of gas budget meters” returns — the rest of households not using the gas network.