Smart Meters

[dennis]

You think wrong.

[Adrian]

Treasury removed the funding for it whilst Thatcher was education minister. Arguably she didn't remove it at all.

Adrian

[Java Jive]

It obviously takes one to know one ...

[Tony Bryer]

The problem for the Mail/Express segment of the press is that when Labour is in power they go overboard telling everyone how better things will be when their lot get back into power. Then when this happens and things don't change significantly, they just struggle to present a coherent message. As a detached observer, I just love the way that Cameron is for ever putting two fingers up to Mail readers - no EU referendum, no ban on GM foods, gay marriage etc etc.

[The Natural Philosopher]

void Left_algorithm() { int cause,solution, action; cause=findSomethingWrong(0); if(cause) blamePreviousToryGovernment(); else solution=blameThatcher(); action=0; taxes++; return (void)LabourGovernment(action * void); }

[harry]

You mean socialists are stupid?

[harry]

True. He will pay for it. Just watch the coming local elections.

[harry]

The expensive bit is being done right now (installing the smart meters). The smart grid is just a matter of co-ordinating them. It could probably be done with a PC sized computer.

[polygonum]

What a bizarre way of expressing computing power!

How many Galaxy S4s (to take one current, fairly powerful-for-its-size generally marketed computer) in one old-style tower case (to take one idea of PC sized)?

[Dave Liquorice]

It's the latter bit that is a major stumbling block. There isn't, or wasn't, an agreed national standard for the protocols that the Smart Meters use to communicate.

And how do you "control" a windmill or PV system? You can't make the wind blow or the sunshine...

[The Natural Philosopher]

exactly. So you control the population's electricity, instead.

working plebs will be subject to random powercuts. Only those in the Party, or with Special Needs (i.e. on benefits) will have electricity on dark cold windless winter nights..

[The Other Mike]

Dispatch of some generation to support systemn frequnecy already takes place by a similar mechanism to smart metering, but it is generation, in the order of

100KW upwards, a typical domestic microgenerator is not deemed important enough to permit such a relationship between the Grid System Operator and the operator of the generation. There is zero possibility of National Grid getting involved in mass dispatch of microgeneration.

Smart metering requires a relationship between an infrastructure supplier and the customer. The infrastructure supplier is, in a great many cases in the UK, not a generator or distributor of electricity. In a nationalised or vertically integrated utility, with large air conditioning or resistive heating load then smart metering could work, in the free for all 'wild west' deregulated UK market with very little electrical resistance heating it makes no sense for anyone to get involved. Never let it be understood the free market is broken, there is no obligation to supply, there is no incentive to invest long term in significant areas in the UK energy sector. (the root causes are well known)

The most significant feature of smart metering is demand management. This works, and has worked for many years, mainly, but not exclusively with industrial and commercial users. The electricity distributor can achieve much more for far less by targeting industrial and commercial users rather than domestic consumers.

Extending demand management to consumer level requires the split of loads within a property between essentials and interruptible's (unless we adopt 'smart, individually addressable mains plugs). This is on top of the smart meter and the infrastructure to support that. The infrastructure to support disconnections using power line carrier techniques from the local distribution point (3.3/6.6/11kV) was actually trialled many years ago, to do so now is very prone to failure due to the widespread use of unlicenced homeplug devices that do not meet any standards for interference and immunity. So you are stuck with

2G or 3G wireless comms, fixed line telephony, or a broadband connection for the delivery of your disconnect and reconnect requests. Fixed infrastructure is probably more reliable.

To implement smart metering in a new property might only cost around £100 on top of the cost of the meter (an additional one or two none essential rings or radials) To implement this on the existing housing stock could be anything from

5x that cost to the cost of a complete rewire which could be many thousands in both the cost and remedial works.

Given the amount of housing stock replaced each year, and the timeframe of full refurbishments then it's not going to happen.

Fundamentally it boils down to the fact that an investment in smart metering, that is at around 100% of the retail cost of electricity consumed per annum, that has the ability to trim demand by only a few % maybe twice per day for 30 minutes per day makes no commercial sense. The payback period is almost certainly longer than the asset life of very longest lived assets on the existing electricity grid.

If someone can afford to implement smart metering then they can make more money from building a wind turbine or a CCGT.

[Man at B&Q]

Grid balancing is the really hard bit, not "just a matter of...".

MBQ

[dennis]

8<

The idea is to control smart appliances..

for instance you can smooth the peaks by turning off a few million freezers and it won't affect the contents at all.

[The Other Mike]

Just work out how long the compressor on a freezer runs for in a typical day, and its rating and you should realise your statement is complete bollocks. The case for smart metering in a country that doesn't widely use aircon or resistive heating in domestic premises is a none starter.

Take a typical modern A++ rated upright fridge freezer, 230kWh per annum

Centrally heated house at a constant temperature so assume that is a 0.63kWh per day

Assume it runs for just one hour per day rather than 24 hour running at a circa

25W load

So that is a flat load of 630W for 60 minutes

Assume 24 million households have the same spec fridge freezer

Roughly one million fridge freezers will each be running for one hour per day coinciding with time of peak demand

That is around 630MW of load control for one hour at a time of peak demand, on a typical peak system loading of 60GW

So does someone (f*ck knows who) speculatively invest in 24 million installations of smart meters costing around 10 billion pounds to save the cost of one hour of 630MW of demand (assume GBP 200* / MWh every day - or GBP 46 milllion per annum... a payback time without allowing for any cost of capital of over 200 years.

• it is often (GBP 30 - 40, the last 4 days range from GBP 53 - 134)

...or do they install say 100 load control schemes at large industrial and commercial users, where the user, by virtue of their electricity demands are fully incentivised to 100% fund the installation themselves by reducing or eliminating peak demand charges, where the installation costs them only a few thousand pounds to implement (with a guaranteed payback period of say five years) and where the existing infrastructure to support this load reduction mechanism has been proven over a number of decades to reliably reduce peak system load as and when required, even during a system disturbance away from system peak.

Smart meters for load control for domestic consumers make no sense at all, they make no sense for microgeneration dispatch either. They are a technology without any sensible application area in the UK. No doubt FoE and Greenpeace and assorted green coloured fuckwits will think they are wonderful.

[The Natural Philosopher]

indeed. Margaret Thatcher would never have allowed them.

[Dave Liquorice]

So how do you *actually* do that in a manner that the user can't easily bypass?

And I doubt that turning freezers off would make that much difference anyway they aren't running most of the time and when they are it's not very much maybe 150 W per freezer. You'd probably get a better result turning off large screen tellies.

[harry]

If you're going to install a smart meter anyway, there is no addtional cost. There is lots of other stuff that could be controlled. Washing machines. Water heaters. Space heaters. Heat pumps. I would forsee this sort of stuff being wired on a separate circuit.

Also there is power exporting stuff to be considered.

There will be no gas supply to future houses, they will use heat pumps. This alone will be a massive saving.

[harry]

You do it with money. Electricity at peak times will be much more expensive.

[harry]

The biggest electricity user in my house is indeed the TV (390w)