I am probably going to change my electricity supplier (i.e. the people I pay for the supply) to make a small saving.
This has lead me to wonder about smart meters. I would quite like one if it would provide the data for me to end up with an MS excel graph showing how much power I use in each hour of the day. Is this likely to be possible? I don't want to read the meter every hour, I could do that now.
From what I have learnt so far, not all meters are the same, and if you have one and then change supplier, the new supplier may say that the meter is incompatible with their systems.
I should say that as a way of life supplying meter readings once a year and then sorting out the bill is quite good enough for me.
Once upon a time, back in the 70s, electricity had to be rationed due to supply problems. This was done in the only way possible at the time: rolling power cuts.
These days, like lines of pensioners queueing outside a possibly-collapsing bank, this sort of thing is very bad publicity for the government. They have made it a law to keep the news of possible bank failures secret, so that gets rid of that particular embarrassment.
The next one is when we start to run out of electricity, currently thought to be in 2015, due to the policy of appeasing the greens by closing perfectly viable coal-fired power-stations and replacing them with nothing effective. No-one dare mention the N-word, and anyway it's too late to get them rolling by then.
So, the government needs to deal with this uncomfortable situation yet get itself off the hook. The method? Smart meters!
You pay the £11bn cost, and the electricity companies can now change the price of electricity moment by moment, the near-instantanous readings being sent by the smart meter so there's no escape except to turn things off. So, at no cost to itself, the government can say 'nothing to do with us, sunshine', while pensioners freeze and we all get used to using cooking the evening meal at midnight and using the washing-machine at 3:00am.
Of course, having the smart meters in place beforehand means that they know your usage pattern, so any attempt to fiddle the meter will stand out.
As we discussed a few months ago, and the report at
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says, the official "Smart Meter" roll out is running late. However, various companies are providing what could best be described as meters which are smarter than the old ones, which will probably have to be swapped or modified in order to be fully compliant when the final standards are agreed.
I think it would be a brave government that would allow the power companies to bring in dynamic pricing to a greater extent than we have it now.
There is a conundrum :I can see that more information about my electricity usage is useful to me, but my enthusiasm for sharing this data with others is somewhat limited.
There are a number of "energy monitors" out there. Clip a small current transformere aound one of the CU tails that connects to a box, that wirelessly transmits the data to a display unit. Some have logging built in and computer interfaces so you can see your energy useage.
I have a CurrentCost unit, works well and is fairly accurate, less than a unit/day adrift from the real meter. Can have a USB connection to a computer, it squirts realtime data over that every 6 seconds or so. It logs stuff itself and periodicaly sends the historical data as well. This data is in a published XML format so easy to work with.
It's not hacking that worries me so much as remote-disconnect it the hands of the power company. A little glitch from your bank, or one of those 2-million-quid bills, and they'll be power-mad keen to disconnect you at the press of a button.
(the hackers won't wait for a full roll-out, there'll be a new exploit every few weeks, until the meter supplier wises up - and finally discovers security)
In fact the hackers will create plausible doubt - that bill can't be right.
Smart meters are the precurser to the smart grid. It's all about peak lopping so saving money and energy. And cut off for non-payment and energy/demand/use regulation/control. They are at nowhere near their ultimate potenial. But easily converted once installed.
We'll all have one whether we like it or not.
There is a pliot project going on somewhere in the UK.
Since banks started to fall over. It was mentioned in a report a few years ago, but apart from noting the item, I didn't keep a reference, and being unfamiliar with banking regulation terminology, can't advise where it might be found.
It could be argued that since deposits are guaranteed up to a certain level, a run on a bank by wrinklies effectively neither helps them or the bank, hence the regulation. The US has a similar scheme to restrict such publication.
I already have a smart meter. I suppose the main advantage is that in theory the meter reader doesn't have to work out how to open my gate (he's failed twice) and I don't have to keep the path to the meter clear of grape vines etc. Reading up on them makes me want to get a generator in case my meter is switched off or hacked. I already have an inverter that seems to work very well of my car battery.
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