Engaging Energy

I am on record as having big reservations about smart meters. I’m going to tell you why.

I love the idea that by allowing people more access to data on their own energy footprints they can, if they so wish, target specific behaviours of their own that waste energy and/or water and so bumping up their bills unnecessarily. For example; if you can see from your bill that running your washing machine after 8pm saves £1 per wash as opposed to running it straight after you get in from work at 6pm, why wouldn’t you change that ? There is no cost to you and you save £50 per year if you do the laundry once a week. The energy that you use is no longer peak, so the expensive to run, marginal power plants don’t have to spark up so often. Those tend to be gas-fired in the UK, so that’s less emissions too. There are no losers expect the gas producers. Everything’s lovely in smart meter land !

But that’s not what is being proposed. You can do that with a really dumb smart meter that just allows charging banding by the hour, rather than what the UK has right now which is just a peak/off-peak/Economy 7 tariff distinction. Those dumb smart meters are known as AMR+ (Automated Metering Reading +). They allow the meter to work on a time resolution of the utility’s choosing (they generally choose hourly metering) and can be read remotely (various solutions here include power line communications, wifi, radio, telephone lines, its really not that important). The important thing is that the time resolution allows utilities to match charges to gross usage, meaning that they can plan their generation much more efficiently and reduce overall costs. In most places, you’d expect that saving to be passed on, so encouraging customers to shift usage to lower tariff periods, creating a virtuous circle until consumption self-optimises. Its up to the customer to react to the price signals in the way that best suits their lifestyle, if they do it at all, and some may not choose to.

The proposals that are being touted by most governments and industry in the industrialised nations go much further than this. They mostly use a system called AMI (Automated Metering Infrastructure) which allows utilities to ‘speak’ in real time to each house and under some proposals to each appliance, so that best use of available power and water may be made. Of course you have to take the utility’s word that this is happening since you can’t verify it in real time without access to their mission critical data. Most proposals include a degree of remote control extending from the grid into the house and past the meter to the appliance. The most often cited, and least intrusive remote control would be the switching off of refridgerators, where it doesn’t really matter when they work so long as they do work. But washing machines have been proposed, tumble driers, electric heaters. I’ve even seen a proposal to downshift the current available to lighting circuits as a response to voltage drops in the distribution grid, not turn them off, just make them slightly dimmer, though I’ll admit that this may have been referring to street lighting, not domestic since I can’t now find the reference.

This is granular and pervasive control of technologies that directly impact our everyday behaviour. Most significantly to me though is the psychological effect of chronic loss of control of our home environment. Once the power switch doesn’t necessarily mean ‘on-off’ any more we lose a significant degree of certainty in precisely the place that we consider safe and certain – our home.

That’s a totally different relationship between utility and customer. It hands the control to the utility and makes the end-user (you can’t really call someone who has no choice a customer) a passive recipient of whatever the utility deigns to allow.
OK, that’s hyperbolae.
In practice most countries have regulators that would provide oversight and try to make sure that consumer rights are protected, the problem with that is that some countries have liberalised markets for utilties and private companies will always try to find a way to maximise profit. It is in their design and they are legally obliged to do so if they have shareholders who want dividends.

The argument is that by time-shifting appliance operation you get the same effect as with AMR+, only you do it automatically, and therefore you can rely on it to provide bigger savings in terms of infrastructure, generating and emissions costs. I’m not actually convinced that the last one is terribly relevant here, the power or water will still be used after all, the only benefit may be in the marginal efficiency of the peaking plant, but I don’t believe that the degree of difference between AMR+ and AMI in terms of emissions is going to be the biggest driver. Its all about cost.

So here’s the problem; because only a very few countries have installed AMR+ at a national scale the pressure is on to jump right up to AMI because it fits in really nicely with the whole smart grid concept of providing stable voltage by a dynamic relationship between generation and consumption as all the proposed new energy generating and saving technology is rolled-out. The meters all have the 20-25 year life so no-one wants to have to do this twice if they discover something that requires AMI.

I haven’t seen any compelling evidence that you actually require AMI to establish a smart grid and there are some really knotty issues around privacy and data use once you put in the more advanced AMI.
There has just been a great report published into these issues by the Canadian group Privacy by Design.

I think that its interesting that if you want really secure data you divide it up, store it and use it in different ‘locations’. I think the spooks call this compartmentalisation. In the financial industry its called Chinese Walls. If you want to work out what’s going on, what behaviours are happening, you bring data together. So bringing water usage data together with electricity and gas. How much insight does it need to put a water use increase together with an immersion heater being switched on and a fan heater being turned on in the bathroom to tell that someone is having a bath or shower ?
I also like the postman analogy in the report mentioned above. You don’t expect the postman to read your mail, so why should your utility know when you are having a shower ?
Or, as the report suggests, it makes so much economic sense to direct the charging of your electric car to your utility bills, but it means that they know where you are or have been.

I’d like to suggest another comparison. When researchers carry out a new piece of work they have to consider the ethics involved in both the collection and the use of the data that they find. In some cases, for instance those involving children or the mentally ill, special vetting or training may have to take place to ensure a full understanding of the researchers responsibilities. The sanction being dismissal, possible professional ruin and even jail. I’d like to know what the proposed safeguards and sanctions are for a full implementation of AMI ?
It turns out that we don’t all play by the rules when it comes to other peoples data, as we found out this week when T-Mobile came under investigation for one of its employees allegedly selling swaths of personal details for personal gain.

I think smart meters, of the AMI type, can be implemented, but only when houses have smart controls that can exert pressure back on the utility and protect the household’s interests.
If the utility wants to switch off your fridge, it should have to negotiate a price for doing so with each house.
Switching appliances on and off is a major cause of electrical component wear. If the utility wants to degrade the performance of appliances that I have worked hard to afford I’d like some recompense.
Using your washing machine may actually be necessary. You’ve run out of nappies or spilt a drink down your best shirt just before an interview. You may not want to sell the utility the ability to time-shift that demand. You may actually want the utility to service your needs.
Or if you’ve done you washing but the utility doesn’t want to let you dry those fresh sheets before your new girlfriend arrives, you may be willing to sacrifice the meadow fresh scent for one more night or not. It all depends ….

AMI is a great bit of kit, but so is AMR+. Not quite as flashy, but very servicable and we know that it works. What isn’t up to standard is the home automation to enable AMI to be rolled out without loss of privacy or loss of personal control.

I will support every move towards what the Italians have already achieved – a roll-out of 27 million forward-compatible AMR+ meters that resulted in potential savings of $100 per household on bills and an estimated 3GW of power plant not being built. After that I think that it should be a personal choice over whether to hand your home over to the utility or not. If the meters are forward-compatible then you can download new software remotely when that choice is made without fannying around with full the privacy and control issues around full AMI.