Smart Meters
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Having researched this subject - which the MSE team clearly hasn't, sorry! - it is my view that smart meters are really for the energy sector's and government's benefit. I conclude that smart meters have very worrying data security issues and are a tool for energy suppliers to turn off supply remotely and charge you more for peak use. Why else would government ie we taxpayers, subsidise their installation by multi billions. It is a con and I am very disappointed that the MSE team have gone along with it.0
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Having researched this subject - which the MSE team clearly hasn't, sorry! - it is my view that smart meters are really for the energy sector's and government's benefit.
Smart meter installation is actually an EU construct
Which is another discussion altogether!
http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/smart-metering-deployment-european-union0 -
Smart meter installation is actually an EU construct
Which is another discussion altogether!
http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/smart-metering-deployment-european-union
It may well have been an EU construct but our government could have adopted a much more logical approach to the roll out like other European countries have done e.g. a selective roll-out plan, based on facts and common sense!
Billions have been wasted for no real gain and we are all paying for this fiasco!0 -
British Gas were the first supplier to use domestic smart meters in the UK. I saw my first one around 2006 which was being replaced in my home towns most prolific meter tampering streets.. Coincidence ?.
They installed them when an old meter had reached the end of its life. BG could see that they were both economic to use and enabled very accurate billing and an important side effect to BG was that they cut down on the large amount of meter tampering going off in certain areas.
They also could cut down on call centre staff and their quite large meter reading teams. They re just cost effective to use. They have enabled BG to save millions over the 12 years. Many of our meter readers lost their jobs year by year because of them .Plain economics which worked well.
12 years down the line these same early smart meters are still in use by most of BG s customers who mostly stick with them.
When BG jumped the gun on all the others by many years I thought they had made a big mistake but as usual BG were one step ahead of the foreign competition who dragged their feet in the smart meter roll out.
Another smart business move by BG. Smart meters made economic sense to them to run their successful business more efficiently.0 -
What would be really useful here is decent reviews of Smart Meters from real customers:
- Make and Model of Meters?
- Who fitted them?
- Overall rating for the meters (1 to 5 star)?
- Rateing for the festures/usefulness of the In Home device IHD (1 to 5 star)
- Any good or bad point found so far?
The only downside to doing this now, is that latter this year (maybe) it will need re-doing as energy companies start fitting SMET2 units.0 -
HiHouse_Martin wrote: ».... They re just cost effective to use. They have enabled BG to save millions over the 12 years. Many of our meter readers lost their jobs year by year because of them .Plain economics which worked well.
.....Smart meters made economic sense to them to run their successful business more efficiently.
Cost effective? ... £fifteen-thousand-million cost to the consumer to enable the industry to 'save millions' .... :rotfl::rotfl:
Meter readers losing jobs year by year over the period due to smart-meters - are you sure that's really the root cause? ...
A decade or so ago we had our meters read 4 times a year for both gas & electric ... that's 8 visits, often involving a card through the letterbox and contacting a call-centre! - We don't have a smart-meter, but with the advent of on-line account management a single reading contractor visits once per year and the need to contact a call centre has been significantly reduced ... nothing to do with smart-meters, but undoubtedly will appear within the overall cost justification somewhere ...
If Smart-Meters make economic sense to BG and other industry players that's fine, let them continue to install them at their own cost & convenience, after-all the energy consumer already pays (and has always paid!) for the provision of infrastructure, including meters ... however, the very fact that the project is adding £billions to consumer bills as opposed to reducing them suggests that the economic argument is flawed ....
HTH
Z"We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit. " ...... Aristotle
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HiIt may well have been an EU construct but our government could have adopted a much more logical approach to the roll out like other European countries have done e.g. a selective roll-out plan, based on facts and common sense!
Billions have been wasted for no real gain and we are all paying for this fiasco!
I tend to agree, other EU countries seem to have understood the directive requirements much better than the UK government, else that or the energy industry lobby is far more active & influential in London than in other capital cities!
Anyway, I recently came across a pretty decent & unbiased summary of the state of the project which is worth taking a few minutes to read through ....
Smart-Metering: A clever green solution rapidly becoming a white elephant?
... the observations & conclusion can't really be argued with as they seem pretty accurate & fair.
HTH
Z"We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit. " ...... Aristotle1 -
Hi
I tend to agree, other EU countries seem to have understood the directive requirements much better than the UK government, else that or the energy industry lobby is far more active & influential in London than in other capital cities!
Anyway, I recently came across a pretty decent & unbiased summary of the state of the project which is worth taking a few minutes to read through ....
Smart-Metering: A clever green solution rapidly becoming a white elephant?
... the observations & conclusion can't really be argued with as they seem pretty accurate & fair.
HTH
Z
A fair and balanced analysis. The most telling statement - which no doubt the ongoing NAO investigation will confirm is this:
As at current date, the project seems to be showing consumer energy savings which are likely to have been overstated by somewhere in the region of £2bn, with an additional £1.4bn of overstatement in switching gross benefits, these two elements alone accounting for a potential £3.4bn error in benefits. Against this, the project cost seems to be understated by around £4.5bn, together describing a gross error in the benefit calculation in the region of £8 billion, reversing the 'best estimate' from showing a project benefit of £3.794bn over 15 years to a loss of approximately the same value.
It is interesting also that the author makes the case that if this poorly thought through and badly managed project is to survive, smart metering should only be offered to high energy users ( a conclusion that Germany came to some time ago).0 -
The overwhelming majority of occupants still do not enter online readings much at all even if they hold an online account.Hi
Cost effective? ... £fifteen-thousand-million cost to the consumer to enable the industry to 'save millions' .... :rotfl::rotfl:
Meter readers losing jobs year by year over the period due to smart-meters - are you sure that's really the root cause? ...
A decade or so ago we had our meters read 4 times a year for both gas & electric ... that's 8 visits, often involving a card through the letterbox and contacting a call-centre! - We don't have a smart-meter, but with the advent of on-line account management a single reading contractor visits once per year and the need to contact a call centre has been significantly reduced ... nothing to do with smart-meters, but undoubtedly will appear within the overall cost justification somewhere ...
If Smart-Meters make economic sense to BG and other industry players that's fine, let them continue to install them at their own cost & convenience, after-all the energy consumer already pays (and has always paid!) for the provision of infrastructure, including meters ... however, the very fact that the project is adding £billions to consumer bills as opposed to reducing them suggests that the economic argument is flawed ....
HTH
Z
Maybe on here with a large number of retired folk contributing to this board they have time and inclination to do it. Out in the real world they can t be ar**d and so end up in debt, with a prepay meter and a big grudge.
What would some of you do without the constant complaints on here from enraged people ranting away at their supplier because they were nt aware the suppliers did nt possess magical powers of second sight due to failure on their part to understand the basics of utility billing.
You all enjoy spreading your wisdom to them to "read the damn meter "or " a "direct debit is nt the actual monthly bill "
BG, the most popular supplier by a country mile in the UK spotted it and as soon as self reading meter which took the customer out of the equation became available they jumped on it fast.
Of course the Germans and French and Spanish hung back until they were absolutely pushed to get going . They are not over here because they like UK consumers, they re here for the money.
I give Ovo and Utilita a pat on the back because they spotted how good smart meters were and they paved the way for smart prepayment meters years ago and did nt need to be told to start installing them.They brought smart prepayment up to date. There is no reason now why smart prepayment tariffs cannot be as low as a fixed tariff.
So did Northern Ireland where smart keypad meters have taken over and are a resounding success.0 -
House_Martin wrote: »The overwhelming majority of occupants still do not enter online readings at all. Maybe on here with a large number of retired folk contributing to this board they have time and inclination to do it. Out in the real world they can t be ar**d and so end up in debt, with a prepay meter and a big grudge.
What would some of you do without the constant complaints on here from enraged people ranting away at their supplier because they were nt aware the suppliers did nt possess magical powers of second sight due to failure on their part to understand the basics of utility billing.
You all enjoy spreading your wisdom to them to "read the damn meter "or " a "direct debit is nt the actual monthly bill "
BG, the most popular supplier by a country mile in the UK spotted it and as soon as self reading meter which took the customer out of the equation became available they jumped on it fast.
Of course the Germans and French hung back until they were absolutely pushed to get going it. They are not over here because they like the UK consumers
I give Ovo and Utilita a pat on the back because they spotted how good they were and paved the way for smart prepayment meters years ago and did nt need to be told to start installing them.
So did Northern Ireland where smart keypad meters have taken over and are a resounding success.
You do not need a smart reader to get remote readings which can then be passed on to a supplier. A simple/cheap optical spot reader will provide a supplier with 15 minute meter readings a fraction of the cost of a SMETS2 meter. I know because I have an optical spot reader attached to my 20 year old gas meter which transmits readings to a simple iPhone app.
You can look at this project from any direction that you like but the facts are that the project is overly complicated; over engineered; late, and considerably over budget. Given that Anglo/Russian relations have now reached a new low why would any sensible Government continue to rollout smart meters that can be disconnected remotely from the Grid - in large numbers - by any Foreign Actor that has the political will; the money and the cyber skills to do so? It is a risk that we do not need to take - however small that this risk might be.
You can read on these forums how angry people get when their meter fails out-of- hours. How would suppliers deal with a large scale cyber attack that might (a) require the development of new firmware and (b) need a man with a van to update the firmware in each meter?0
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