Smart meter data creates visibility. Action recovers revenue.
Non-technical losses (NTL) is delivered electricity but not paid for due to any non-technical reason. This can be usual suspects like theft, meter tampering/bypass, unmetered supply, but can come from billing and reading errors, and issues in data collection. Smart meters create visibility to tackle NTL, but data and visibility alone does not directly translate into NTL detection nor revenue return. NTL is comprised of three major segments:
- fraud and tampering
- process challenges (metering, data collection and billing)
- operational bottlenecks (converting high volume meter data into accurate and prioritized cases, and resolving them)
Smart meter rollout is not a solution, but the prerequisite and very often the point where the most amount of NTL is introduced. Firstly, with introduction of smart meters, amount and frequency of data rises significantly and hence result in added complexity and time necessary to process the data. Secondly, the moment of meter modernization is explicitly identified as high risk (installation is a window for meter manipulation).
More often than not, rollout is done by an outsourced company. End users see this as an opportunity to bribe the installers to bypass part of the electricity delivered. This results not only in revenue loss due to theft, but also with repeated truck rolls for redoing the smart meter installations. Also, meter tampering is a safety issue, linked to fire hazards and risk to workers and the public.
Usually, teams responsible for revenue protection or dispatch teams are scanning though vast amounts of data, usually focusing on obvious cases like zero or low consumers, or customer tips and ad-hoc rules. Backlog grows which results in bottlenecks and premature closing of real cases as non-NTL ones to reduce the logs. Field crews are dispatched on broad campaigns or sampling, with low actionable items and cost is bigger than revenue return.
To truly address NTL, it is necessary to have a solution that is designed to unify data across operations; in the metering context it consolidates remote metering system data, automates validation/enrichment, and supports analytics outputs (forecasts, alerts, decisions) that can be executed operationally. Thaora is designed and developed with exactly those points in mind.
See losses earlier. Stop them faster.
Thaora gives utilities one operational view across different information - measuring points, telemetry status, events, and consumption data. By having all the information in one platform, provides multiple benefits. One of the benefits is faster identification of the suspicious behavior (temper events, communication outages). It reduces the time necessary to identify the issues, especially if teams are also relying on manual checks and disconnected tools. In practical terms, teams can cut low-value effort spent on data collection, cross-checking, and first-level triage because they spend less time proving that a problem exists and more time deciding what to do about it. Second benefit is the positive impact on the investigation time, which directly transfers to better productivity.
Thaora allows teams to move from system-wide overview to a specific issue much faster through filtering, map-based views, and drill-down into individual measuring points. So instead of spending hours moving between reports and trying to establish context, operators can identify where the problem is, what type of issue they are seeing, and which assets or locations require attention in one place. Implementing those practices, causes and estimated reduction in the overall incidence of energy theft by an average of 25%.
In many European markets non-technical losses still sit in the 2–5% range in Southern Europe, while parts of CEE and SEE operate in the 3–10%+ range, so delayed visibility directly increases financial and operational exposure. Addressing this segment noticeably contributes to recovered revenue.
Find revenue leaks before they grow
Thaora is the system that improves visibility, monitoring discipline, and early detection. In return this helps reduce revenue leakage by exposing abnormal meter behavior, missing data, poor-quality readings, and suspicious event patterns earlier, before they cascade into billing gaps, bad debt, unresolved anomalies, or missed follow-up actions.
The amount of recovered revenue from NTL by having one operational view system like Thaora can increase compared to existing results from 50% to even 100% in some cases, depending on previous practices. That value is more pronounced in markets where estimated non-technical losses are materially higher, such as Romania at roughly 3–6%, Bulgaria at 4–7%, Serbia at 5–8%, or other high-loss environments where poor observability directly feeds revenue leakage.
Thaora is the operational foundation for loss reduction: it gives utilities the visibility, control, and monitoring discipline needed to detect risk earlier, work more efficiently, and limit avoidable revenue leakage. Once that foundation is in place, dedicated NTL solutions like Comping NTL becomes the natural next step, providing advanced analytics and machine learning, and designed to fit high data volume utility environments.
Sources:
Smart Meter Roll-Out Cost-Benefit Analysis, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, 2019
Unlocking Smart Grid Opportunities in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies, International Energy Agency (IEA), 2024
DSO Observatory 2024 - Unlocking Flexibility in Europe, Alexis Meletiou, Julija Vasiljevska, and Silvia Vitiello (Joint Research Centre), 2025
Energy transition in the EU, Agnieszka Widuto (European Parliamentary Research Service), 2023
Benchmarking smart metering deployment in the EU-28, Frédéric Tounquet and Clément Alaton (Tractebel Impact), 2020
Independent Review of RECO’s AMI Business Case and Recommendations for New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, Navigant (A Guidehouse Company), 2019
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Connect with me via: jan.sabec@thaora.com
