Smart Meters - good idea or not?

Freebird53

QrizB said:

casjen said:

Smart meters are totally pointless. In this digital age sending the readings over your phone/pc every month ensures both, you know the company has got them and B they are accurate. The don't save you any money whatsoever.  Just digital junk.

Speaking from personal experience, my smart meter allowed me to switch to a smart time-of-use tariff that has saved me something like £300 over the past 12 months.

Cool! Have you got an electric car?

victor2

Freebird53 said:

A number of years ago, BG sent me a nifty little gadget which i simply attached around (it was a coil) to the incoming supply, and which had a nice little display, which i could position anywhere in the house to give me a readout of electrical energy use and the cost. Are they still available?

I had one from Eon. Think it stopped working when I upgraded my PC to Windows 7 from XP!

Looks like you can still get that sort of thing:

https://www.smartgreenshop.co.uk/home-energy-monitors/standard-sensor

Alnat1

I have smart meters and have TOU tariffs with Octopus. I don't have an EV. The prices I pay are often lower than the government capped rates and can't go higher.

My gas is on Tracker and today's unit price is 6.38p, the price changes each day. My electricity is on Agile and the price changes in 30 minute slots. Today it varies from 25.98p to 33.03p (capped maximum)

doodling

Hi,

There is some slight overselling of smart meters in the text below.

Dolor said:

I wish people would take a step back from the usual approach of 'how will it benefit me'?

Smart meters are but one part of what is known as a smart grid. A smart grid is necessary because our energy supply is no longer constant as was the case when we had coal-fired power stations. Today, National Grid has to manage the weather and time-dependent vagaries of renewable energy where the amount of electricity provided by solar and wind power can range from 60% to not a lot - as is the case at the moment:



You can see that nearly 60% of our electricity is coming from gas at 9.20am on an October morning.

Renewable energy cannot be turned on and off with ease. It makes sense to offer cheap energy when supply exceeds demand and vice versa. Making good decisions requires better consumer profiling. Better profiling means that the Grid (and more truthfully, we) are not paying to have a coal-fired power station sitting on idle on a 'just in case' basis.

This isn't the case, NG already has a very good idea of what electricity will be needed when and works very hard not to have excess generation capacity on line when it is not required.  Smart meters don't help because they tell you the past, scheduling electricity generation is all about the future.  Smart meters do not tell NG anything they don't already know; they already know what happened yesterday, and the same time last week and last year (and for the last 50 decades before that) and have models which estimate how that varies with temperature and wind speed amongst other things, smart meters do not help at all.

The Grid operators need to know how much energy is needed per year and when the energy is being used. Smart meters provide this granularity. Renewable energy brings with it voltage and frequency challenges. My grid voltage goes up by 5volts when the two local solar farms start to generate. This has to be managed and DNOs are now trialling pro-active grid voltage management at an area level by taking voltage data from smart meters.

Smart meters might help DNOs to better manage voltage on their LV distribution networks, I agree.  Distributed generation does not introduce frequency challenges, there simply isn't enough of it and a lot of it is passed through inverters which act differently to synchronous machines in any event.

Many countries now have both time-of-use and demand restricted tariffs. The latter require the consumer to sign up to a power limit (kW): the benefit of doing so is a much cheaper overall tariff. The consumer is helping the Grid operator and gets cheaper energy as a result.

This is what smart meters are all about, the change from electricity being provided "when required" to being provided "when the wind blows".  In order for that transition to take place, people need to be encouraged to only use electricity when it is available and smart meters enable that by enabling differential pricing.

In sum, the whole point of a smart grid is to better manage demand with ever-changing renewable supplies along with better grid frequency and voltage control, and earlier grid component fault detection. It is not just about the supplier being able to bill on actual meter readings.

Smart meters have no effect on frequency control and will never do so.  I agree that they might help the DNO with fault detection (but they don't generally have a problem with that without smart meters).  They are (or will become) a demand management tool which enables differential pricing to encourage the country to better match demand with the available electricity.

There is an entirely separate discussion about whether transitioning to an electricity supply which only works when the wind blows is a good idea but that isn't related to smart meters, smart meters could still have a place in an entirely nuclear (or fossil fuel) grid as anything which allows demand to be varied to suit NG make managing the grid easier.

Freebird53

Alnat1 said:

I have smart meters and have TOU tariffs with Octopus. I don't have an EV. The prices I pay are often lower than the government capped rates and can't go higher.

My gas is on Tracker and today's unit price is 6.38p, the price changes each day. My electricity is on Agile and the price changes in 30 minute slots. Today it varies from 25.98p to 33.03p (capped maximum)

That gas tracker looks interesting. Don't quote me, but i'm sure i read on The Daily Telegraph recently, that the price of gas has dropped by 60%!

bomdabass

Smart meters will inevitably be used to charge your more for using at peak times.

Avoid.

victor2

bomdabass said:

Smart meters will inevitably be used to charge your more for using at peak times.

Avoid.

Smart meters will inevitably be used to give you cheaper rates for using at off-peak times.

Embrace the future.

[Deleted User]

doodling said:

Hi,

There is some slight overselling of smart meters in the text below.

Dolor said:

I wish people would take a step back from the usual approach of 'how will it benefit me'?

Smart meters are but one part of what is known as a smart grid. A smart grid is necessary because our energy supply is no longer constant as was the case when we had coal-fired power stations. Today, National Grid has to manage the weather and time-dependent vagaries of renewable energy where the amount of electricity provided by solar and wind power can range from 60% to not a lot - as is the case at the moment:



You can see that nearly 60% of our electricity is coming from gas at 9.20am on an October morning.

Renewable energy cannot be turned on and off with ease. It makes sense to offer cheap energy when supply exceeds demand and vice versa. Making good decisions requires better consumer profiling. Better profiling means that the Grid (and more truthfully, we) are not paying to have a coal-fired power station sitting on idle on a 'just in case' basis.

This isn't the case, NG already has a very good idea of what electricity will be needed when and works very hard not to have excess generation capacity on line when it is not required.  Smart meters don't help because they tell you the past, scheduling electricity generation is all about the future.  Smart meters do not tell NG anything they don't already know; they already know what happened yesterday, and the same time last week and last year (and for the last 50 decades before that) and have models which estimate how that varies with temperature and wind speed amongst other things, smart meters do not help at all.

The Grid operators need to know how much energy is needed per year and when the energy is being used. Smart meters provide this granularity. Renewable energy brings with it voltage and frequency challenges. My grid voltage goes up by 5volts when the two local solar farms start to generate. This has to be managed and DNOs are now trialling pro-active grid voltage management at an area level by taking voltage data from smart meters.

Smart meters might help DNOs to better manage voltage on their LV distribution networks, I agree.  Distributed generation does not introduce frequency challenges, there simply isn't enough of it and a lot of it is passed through inverters which act differently to synchronous machines in any event.

Many countries now have both time-of-use and demand restricted tariffs. The latter require the consumer to sign up to a power limit (kW): the benefit of doing so is a much cheaper overall tariff. The consumer is helping the Grid operator and gets cheaper energy as a result.

This is what smart meters are all about, the change from electricity being provided "when required" to being provided "when the wind blows".  In order for that transition to take place, people need to be encouraged to only use electricity when it is available and smart meters enable that by enabling differential pricing.

In sum, the whole point of a smart grid is to better manage demand with ever-changing renewable supplies along with better grid frequency and voltage control, and earlier grid component fault detection. It is not just about the supplier being able to bill on actual meter readings.

Smart meters have no effect on frequency control and will never do so.  I agree that they might help the DNO with fault detection (but they don't generally have a problem with that without smart meters).  They are (or will become) a demand management tool which enables differential pricing to encourage the country to better match demand with the available electricity.

There is an entirely separate discussion about whether transitioning to an electricity supply which only works when the wind blows is a good idea but that isn't related to smart meters, smart meters could still have a place in an entirely nuclear (or fossil fuel) grid as anything which allows demand to be varied to suit NG make managing the grid easier.

A pretty decent summary, but a couple of points which are not quite true.

Distributed generation does introduce frequency challenges, precisely because of the point you mention. As it is all ‘hidden’ by inverters, there is no inertia contribution to the grid and therefore frequency changes caused by load mismatch are faster.  This can actually cause bigger problems where generators trip off if the frequency changes too fast (often in older implementations of G59 or RoCoF LoM protection).

Smart meters (or anything else that could enable demand control) can play a part in frequency management by providing another tool by which mismatches between demand and generation can be prevented or corrected.

DNOs are also terrible at fault detection and condition monitoring on the low voltage network - there just isn’t enough measurement equipment at that level and smart meters could help massively in that regard.

Your primary point is correct though, the major benefit of smart meters at this time is the enabling of ToU tariffs and the potential to create more active consumers rather than the traditional passive relationship between users and the system.

MarkFromCornwall

doodling said:

 NG already has a very good idea of what electricity will be needed when and works very hard not to have excess generation capacity on line when it is not required.  Smart meters don't help because they tell you the past, scheduling electricity generation is all about the future.  Smart meters do not tell NG anything they don't already know; they already know what happened yesterday, and the same time last week and last year (and for the last 50 decades before that) and have models which estimate how that varies with temperature and wind speed amongst other things, smart meters do not help at all.

50 decades?  That would be before a national grid existed (1935).  Indeed, before the birth of Michael Faraday (1791).  Just being pedantic!

FreeBear

Freebird53 said:

A number of years ago, BG sent me a nifty little gadget which i simply attached around (it was a coil) to the incoming supply, and which had a nice little display, which i could position anywhere in the house to give me a readout of electrical energy use and the cost. Are they still available?

A couple more...

https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/MIHO006

https://www.theowl.com/index.php/products/energy-monitors/

https://peacefair.aliexpress.com/store/group/AC-Energy-Module-RS485/1773456_513494680.html - Got a couple of the PZEM-016 modules myself.