Smart meters leave consumers out of pocket and underwhelmed

Intelligent technology has left consumers underwhelmed, but smart meters offer tremendous advantages to energy suppliers.

By Gordon Routledge
Wednesday 17th April 2019

Are you glued to your smart meter display while your family get on with life? Do you chastise them for turning on lights and leaving doors open when you see your energy costs leap in real-time? You may have done for the first few days or weeks after installation, but the excitement of a new bit of tech soon subsides when you realise you won't reach early retirement on the back of energy savings.

A recent survey from the ECA and YouGov shows you're not alone. Only 7% of smart meter users reported a drop in their energy bills, while 9% of users' energy bills increased. Despite the government pushing energy-saving potential as one of the main reasons to have one fitted. The ECA survey highlights that nearly half of the users report no benefits at all.

The smart meter itself can't help save energy; all it can do is make you more aware of what you use before you get a hefty bill and avoid trips to the meter cupboard. To save energy, you either need to choose more efficient appliances, use existing ones more effectively or not use them at all. Avoiding using the washing machine means a trip to the river to bash your clothes around on some rocks. Not exactly a smart use of time, we could conclude that smart meters are, from a customer perspective, a bit dumb.

So why the push towards smart metering?

The big wins of smart fall on the side of the energy suppliers and network operators. Smart meters are the endpoints of what is known as a smart grid. By connecting millions of homes and business', the energy network can more accurately manage demand, deal with the increasing amounts of renewable energy generation and the predicted growth in electric vehicles.

What does this mean for consumers?

The role consumers play in this loop will be driven through what the energy suppliers refer to as "price signals." If you want to boil your kettle, run the washing machine and take a shower at 6pm on a day when the grid is using expensive generation or lacks the capacity to transmit energy, you'll pay for the privilege. The flip side of this is if you can shift your energy use to later in the day, when perhaps it's windy, and energy prices are low you'll pay a much lower cost. Of course, this isn't a new approach; it's been the backbone of economy seven tariffs for decades.

Smart metering allows prices to be set and adjusted in response to real-time supply and demand. Does this mean you'll be showering at midnight and getting up at 2am to start the washing machine? It could do if you want to live a frugal existence, but this is where the clever bit of smart metering kicks in.

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A bridge to smart homes

Smart meters include a dedicated wireless home area network (HAN) which uses the ZigBee protocol. This network is used already, to connect the meter to the home energy display, which shows the real-time energy use. Eventually, this network will be able to communicate with smart appliances, via a hub called a Consumer Access Device (CAD). The CAD also separates the consumer side of Internet of Things (IoT), and its security challenges from that of the metering operator.

The CAD can take the price signals from the energy supplier and influence how an appliance operates. You may push start on a smart dishwasher, but the smart meter kicks off the cycle when energy prices are lowest. You wouldn't notice if your fridge were disconnected for an hour to help manage grid peaks. The low power consumption of a fridge may sound like small fry in terms of the national grid, but when you combine the potential of millions of connected devices, it adds up to a massive potential for Demand Side Reduction (DSR).

Could your electricity meter take control of your washing machine?

What else can smart meters do?

The standard for smart metering in the UK is SMETS2 (Smart Metering Equipment Technical Specification) replacing SMETS1, which relied upon the 3G network and didn't ensure interoperability between operators and resulted in meters going back to dumb mode. SMETS2 meters use a dedicated network created for smart metering by Data Communications Company (DCC).

Core features of SMETS2 meters

Time of use (TOU) Tariff data
Active energy import / export - kWh
Reactive energy import / export - kVAr
Maximum demand and load profile
Load limiting features
Power quality recording - over/under voltage, sag, swell
Power interruption reporting
Tamper detection and alarms
Disconnect relay
Auxiliary load relay
Credit management features.

This feature set gives an interesting glimpse to the future proofing within the distribution network. For the last twenty years residential power consumption has been falling. This trend is set to reverse with the uptake of electric vehicles and phasing out of gas heating in new build properties. Historically residential power loading has relied upon diversity between different dwellings to manage demand. The introduction of more EV charging and air sourced heat pumps will challenge this, as more homes have high loads for extended periods. A scenario of someone switching on a 10kW electric shower, when a car is charging at 7kW and 10kW heat pump running will blow the service fuse. The introduction of automatic load management will reduce this risk.

Nest Rush Hour Rewards leverages IoT link to the customer

An alternative path to the consumer.

Latest data from Elexon shows around 10 million smart electricity meters have now been fitted in the UK, and this equates to about one-fifth of the market. The original target was for all UK homes to have a Smart meter by 2020.

While the smart meter infrastructure has taken a long time to develop and deploy, IoT devices have been on the rise and offer an alternative path to the consumer. In the USA Nest, the smart thermostat company owned by Google, offer a rush hour rewards program. This program, offered in partnership with energy suppliers, allows access to thermostats, to reduce air conditioning and heating loads during times of peak demand. Consumers who sign up receive various discounts and rebates off their electricity bills. This IoT approach is an alternative path to the customer outside of the metering infrastructure.

The critical question being - Will the link between the meter and appliances happen at hub level within the home or in the cloud, leveraged by services from Amazon and Google?

Nest have driven adoption with incentives not promises.

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