By 2019, the government plans to have replaced 53 million gas and electricity meters across the UK with smart meters. These meters will provide domestic consumers with "near real time" information on their energy consumption and communicate wirelessly with energy providers, eliminating the need for estimated billing.
While consumers could stand to save money with the elimination of estimated bills, Ofgem anticipates that the smart meter installation programme beginning in 2014 could cost upwards of £11 billion -- and the installation price tag is only the beginning of the smart headache.
The main catalyst for the government's mass installation of smart meters came in July 2009, when a European Commission Directive made it a requirement that 80 percent of EU households have a smart meters installed by 2020.
The British government felt that it could be more ambitious still,
unveiling a strategy in March 2011 that would see 53 million smart meters installed in 30 million homes and businesses across the country by 2019. Chris Huhne, then secretary of state for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said that smart meters were to play a key role in "giving us all more control over how we use energy at home and at work, helping us to cut out waste and save money" -- a line which was to become central to the DECC's message on smart meters.
On 19 December 2012, Huhne's successor Edward Davey announced the publication of the first DECC annual progress report on the smart meter roll-out, again heralding the potential the devices would have "to transform consumers' relationship with energy bringing considerable benefits for both them and the energy industry. Smart meters will for the first time put consumers, who are at the heart of the roll-out, in control of their energy use, allowing them to adopt energy efficiency measures that can help save money on their energy bills, offset price increases and reduce carbon emissions."
Yet the role that smart meters play in producing these benefits is far from clear. The meters themselves do not save energy, they simply show how much energy is being consumed. It is this newly available source of information for the consumer that the EU hopes will apparently result in new energy efficient habits.
While energy companies have been tasked with installing the smart meters and footing the bill for the installation, there is nothing to stop the energy companies transfering cost of the roll-out onto consumer's subsequent energy bills -- a risk which has led consumer group Which? to call a halt to the smart meter roll out.
Steve Thomas, professor of energy policy and director of research at the University of Greenwich, published a report titled
'Not too smart an innovation' in the December issue of the journal
Energy & Environment. For Thomas, the truly "smart" potential of the smart meters stands a great chance of being overlooked by the DECC. The smart meter's ability to allow energy suppliers to communicate prices directly to consumers could allow for an introduction of time-of-day pricing, "so that the price of electricity to end-users would vary, unpredictably, according to its wholesale price." Such a system could also allow for the national grid to become a smart grid, eliminating costly peaks and troughs in energy demands by varying prices according to demand, and thus changing the habits of household consumers.
If time-of-day pricing were to be introduced, says Thomas, the smart meter would come into its own -- informing users of when it was more expensive to turn on their kettle or run their washing machine. Energy prices high because the majority of the nation is cooking dinner? Turn off your tumble dryer and non-essential electrical items until the spike in prices falls. "Without time-of-day pricing I fail to see what benefits there can be with smart meters," Thomas said in an interview with Wired.co.uk. "The benefits that DECC talks about; avoiding meter reading -- which really is not that big an issue considering it's a cost footed by the energy companies; avoiding estimated bills, which again doesn't need an £11 billion investment to get rid of -- where could you possibly get benefits paying off that kind of investment? It can only be time of day pricing that justifies them."
But time-of-day pricing hasn't been tabled by the government.
The DECC has also been tightlipped over the costs incurred by the new process of transferring meter data between a household's smart meter and the energy supplier. The transfer of data will require a system that currently doesn't exist, and will have to be paid for by someone . "In their publicity," Thomas writes in his report, "DECC and Ofgem are forthcoming neither about how costs will be incurred, nor about how benefits will accrue. DECC merely claims that households will save, on average, £23 a year, and that, over 20 years, net savings will amount to £7.3 billion. But it neither specifies how these savings will build up, nor identifies the costs entailed."
The root of the savings, according to James Woudhuysen, professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, is a product not of technical engineering, but social engineering -- or rather, "guilt". Also writing in the journal *Energy &
Environment*, Woudhuysen outlines how the new meters fail to be smart when it comes to saving energy: "...it would be better to describe smart meters as 'guilt meters'. They are about focusing popular thoughts about energy not on the continuing reasons for its supply being so costly, which relate to lack of innovation, but on the merits of personally cutting back -- or trying to cut back -- on energy use. They are about that wider and wholly patronising exercise known as 'raising awareness'."
Woudhuysen told Wired.co.uk that rather than spending £11 billion on installing a device that would "make you feel bad every time you made a cup of tea", the money should be out into finding technical solutions for energy supply. "The solutions should be technical, not social, it needs to be channelled into the supply side, creating fast multiple source energy supplies and mechanising it faster. The whole energy bill misses it, but rather confirms the government's utter obsession with prices, contracts, carbon taxes, carbon prices and everything that has nothing to do with fundamental R&D. All of their efforts to get to you to reduce energy use through meters or through insulating your home, will take longer, cost more and be less effective than fixing energy supply."
A key frustration, for both Thomas and Woudhuysen, is the irrelevant criticisms that the smart meters have drawn from the wider public and press since they were announced. With data on energy consumption flowing from consumer's homes to energy suppliers and third parties, groups such as the European Data Protection Supervisor are keen to raise awareness over the threat that smart meters pose to distributing consumers' personal data. "I'm not bothered by the security risks involved," Woudhuysen told Wired.co.uk, "but I am bothered that the state wants to waste £11 billion on a thing that isn't smart, and will only increase the level of paranoia in society. "There may be something in the breakdown of privacy and the security surrounding such data, but they're not the real risks. The real risks are an over inflated waste of money and a wider picture of state intervention in household life -- how we should use energy in the home. As with all of these manoeuvres, the emphasis is on social engineering rather than engineering. There's bugger-all engineering involved in smart meters."
Thomas believes that a great deal of information regarding smart meters needs to be spread before the public gains an adequate understanding of why the technology is being installed in their homes. "I fear the social consequences; if you need gas and electricity to survive a cold spell and you see a horribly high figure on your smart meter then that -- for some people -- will tip them over the top and they'll turn things off because they're scared. "I am happy for people to know when generating electricity is expensive, and it would be of value to society if people switched things off when there was the need -- what I am against is people being hit over the head with a fear of a bill that they cannot meet and turning things off that are vital to their welfare. Information is prime."
Yet the most recent feedback from members of the public to have smart meters installed in their homes, published by the DECC on 19 December, would suggest that there is a benefit to informing consumers of just how much energy various hold appliances are using up. A homeowner from the sampled 18-30 age range said: "It was an eye opener, more for the unexpected things. You know the tumble dryer, the washing machine and the kettle are going to get it going, but the down-lighters in the bathroom, that was a shock," while a retired home owner from Scotland reported, "It's not been a case of cutting down, more of turning things off that are unnecessary." It's still yet to be seen whether the amounts saved by homeowners will justify a £11 billion investment in smart meter technology and the accompanying data costs.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
