Millions of Smart Meters Will Be Defunct When 2G and 3G Turns Off (theregister.com) 137
Paul Kunert reports via The Register: A gaggle of MPs are calling for government to put together a timetable for the replacement of millions upon millions of smart meters that will be defunct when 2G and 3G mobile networks are switched off. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) comprised of cross-party MPs penned a report to update the rollout of the smart meters, with multiple deadlines missed along the way of the $17 billion billion project. The report echoes an earlier one by the National Audit Office (NAO), which found that as of March 2023, energy companies had rolled out the devices to just 57 percent (roughly 32.4 million out of a potential install base of 57.1 million) homes and businesses. Of these devices, around 9 percent were not functioning properly.
The PAC says in its latest report: "A fifth more (an estimated seven million) will lose functionality when the 2G and 3G mobile communications networks are closed if they do not receive costly hardware upgrades (the cost of which will ultimately be borne by the billpayers)." UK comms regulator Ofcom announced last month that UK mobile operators do not intend to provide 2G and 3G mobile networks past 2033. "The switch-off will affect customers using older mobile devices and services." The PAC wants to know what the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), as well as energy regulator Ofgem, are doing to plan the smooth running of a replacement scheme.
It asks both to set out "what they will do to ensure suppliers assign more importance than at present to replacing those smart meters not functioning properly" and "a timetable for replacing the communication hub element of smart meters that will lose functionality when the 2G and 3G mobile networks are switched off." [...] The PAC also want DESNZ and Ofgem to outline "measures to ensure that suppliers use future-proofed technology -- for example, by excluding 2G or 3G connectivity -- in all new smart meter installations." And it wants the department and the energy watchdog to detail program costs to Parliament on an annual basis to inform decisions about the rollout.
The PAC says in its latest report: "A fifth more (an estimated seven million) will lose functionality when the 2G and 3G mobile communications networks are closed if they do not receive costly hardware upgrades (the cost of which will ultimately be borne by the billpayers)." UK comms regulator Ofcom announced last month that UK mobile operators do not intend to provide 2G and 3G mobile networks past 2033. "The switch-off will affect customers using older mobile devices and services." The PAC wants to know what the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), as well as energy regulator Ofgem, are doing to plan the smooth running of a replacement scheme.
It asks both to set out "what they will do to ensure suppliers assign more importance than at present to replacing those smart meters not functioning properly" and "a timetable for replacing the communication hub element of smart meters that will lose functionality when the 2G and 3G mobile networks are switched off." [...] The PAC also want DESNZ and Ofgem to outline "measures to ensure that suppliers use future-proofed technology -- for example, by excluding 2G or 3G connectivity -- in all new smart meter installations." And it wants the department and the energy watchdog to detail program costs to Parliament on an annual basis to inform decisions about the rollout.
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really a big problem however it does mean sending a technician to replace the module, checking it etc.
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The reality is the modem is a module in most meters. So a 3G modem module is simply replaced with a new module (5G)
Not really a big problem however it does mean sending a technician to replace the module, checking it etc.
Pretty much the same effort as replacing all meters, at least in man*hour required to do the job. Maybe even more man*hour than plain replacing them depending on how the modem module is setup.
Anyway, I had a hard believing those meters were using 3G! What were they thinking? Where I live, meters send data over the electrical network so the electric company runs its own network to send the data. It's perfectly possible to send data and even have Internet over the electrical network although Internet over the
Maybe a misunderstanding in the article? (Score:3)
Looking at the article, it mentions "energy" numerous times, but "electrical" zero.
Would it be possible that most of those 2G/3G "smart" meters are for gas, not electricity? That would explain not just using the wire to phone home.
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LOL! good point! I never heard of Internet over gas pipes yet...
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It's both. 18 million smart electricity meters, and 13 million smart gas meters.
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Of which only 7M are the problematic 2G/3G variants...
So it could be concentrated among the gas meters.
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There are water meters too. They're more difficult though, as many are underground or in shallow pits, which is terrible for RF. And being in shallow pits means more difficult design - not just being underwater after a rain, but having lots of strange chemicals being washed in that will corrode enclosures and electrical potting. The people I know who work in utility metering says the water meters are the most difficult for design and manufacturing.
Gas meters have the problem of leaks too, which means the
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You're flat-out wrong. There are smart meters using power line signalling that's received at local substations. It might not work with US-style transformer per user builds, but it works on Chinese and Australian style builds where power is distributed at 11kV and there's a transformer to step down to 230V for each city block.
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Ahem, it doesn't work in the UK where I live :)
Wireless only here. Mobile network or 900MHz mesh
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UK (and places like Hong Kong and Singapore that followed the same pattern) are a bit different because they were built out post WW2 in a way designed to minimise use of expensive metals. Maybe something about the arrangement used there precludes use of power line signalling? It still doesn't mean there are no smart meters that use power line signalling, there just aren't any in certain countries/regions.
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https://www.electronicdesign.c... [electronicdesign.com]
PLC, or Power Line Communication, is totally a thing.
Two things help with this:
1. The required bandwidth is negligible.
2. The meters can act as boosters, enabling a mesh network type condition.
You can get 100mbit networking in your home with power line networking devices. Longer range at lower data rates shouldn't be a shocker.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is indeed used over actual distribution lines, not just in the home.
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UK smart meters are replacing millions of already installed electric and gas meters. The gas meters will have no connection to the grid except to draw power locally, and I don't know how the electrical grid works to know if it can just have data sent over it without replacing cables in the strret etc.
Re: Not really (Score:2)
In the US, our gas meters just use a battery...
Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
Much less effort to replace the modem - ours was done in 5 minutes, without any interruption to the power supply to the house. Replacing the meter would have required interruption and taken much longer.
I spoke to the technician afterward, and he said they had predefined modules for all the meter types, and he had yet to experience an issue in the weeks he had been replacing them, so I guess the company did their testing beforehand.
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Basically it boils down to
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Some do use this PLC communciation; it's slow but you don't need fast comms for this. But there are lots of places where that doesn't work. Rural areas are particularly difficult as there's not an easy way to get good line of sight communications for RF.
I guarantee you that today people are building stuff using 5G which they plan to have in the field for 10 to 20 years. All these new "G"s were marketed at being the best solution ever, easy to fool customers into thinking it's the last G they'll ever need
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> Not really a big problem however it does mean sending a technician to replace the module, checking it etc.
They take weeks to arrive as there are so few of them.
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Mighty tricky if the module is soldered to the rest of the meter.
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If the modem is considered "modular", that pretty much means that it ISN'T soldered into place.
Kind of like how with most laptops the wireless is on a daughter card, it's easy to replace.
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It all depends on the implementation in any particular meter. There are all kinds of cell modem "modules" that have pads around the edge or underside (examples [google.com]), and are meant to be soldered to a host PCB. That bootstraps development and manufacture, but makes them irreparable. Other modems fit into a header or M.2
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That makes them a module, but not modular.
Part of the reason it was a daughtercard in a lot of places was that it costs money to get a wireless unit certified, so it was cheaper to just certify the daughtercard than to get the entire motherboard certified, and have to redo the certification every time you changed something.
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Yeah, uh... maybe you're living in a city that has 5G coverage.
I'm not exactly out in the boons but, if they cut off 2G and 3G service, I no longer have a working cellphone. There's no 5G for miles. So, y'know, if they want to lose my cell subscription, I guess I'm left with a miniature tablet instead of a phone.
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There are a lot of meters that don't use modems, or at least not on the mter itself. They may use RF to a local upload device that uses a modem though. Some are point-to-point, some are mesh, some use power line communications, etc. I don't know the percentage that actually use the modems though.
I do know that for several months our electric vehicle chargers at work were down, because they had 3G modems that couldn't connect anymore but there was a very long backlog in getting new modems. Overall I see
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Might be easier to design a femtocell and stick that on, power it with energy harvesting.
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Ours got updated earlier this year. Bloke came out and did it in 5 minutes, on to the next house.
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Many can't be replaced as very often the modem modules are soldered on. And then the product team (the ones not doing the engineering) failed to plan for replacements or over-the-air upgrades. Too much short term thinking.
Now with utilities, they are very allergic to sending trucks out to a house. When they need to send a truck to all houses, that's extremely expensive. That should be incentive for them to turn around that shout at the device makers for being so inept as to not allow cheaper updates, or fo
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That depends on how technical replacing the modem is. If it's about as complicated as replacing the meter itself (IE pull card, push new card in), then might as well have them do it, that way you don't have the power loss from pulling the meter.
It's also a lot less weight in the back of the van.
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I certainly can't disagree. I have no clue what's involved in replacing a modem in these things. It could be as simple as cutting the seal, pulling the glass bubble, remove a module brightly labeled "MODEM (this end out)", stuffing a new one in, watching for the little "connected" light to come on, and buttoning it up. If it's truly that brainless, then yeah, I'd trust at least 95% of the electricians I've met to pull it off correctly. (There's always that % in any industry that couldn't pour piss out o
This is what happens... (Score:2)
...when you depend on someone else's infrastructure
Some times, it's unavoidable. I depend on the electric utility and the internet
There are many other cases where this is troublesome. Some old CNC machines still run on DOS machines with 286 processors
Why not put a microcell in a van? (Score:3)
Re:Why not put a microcell in a van? (Score:5, Interesting)
Smart meters aren't just about replacing the meter reader. They allow the utility to rapidly detect and localize outages, have different pricing for high-demand times, and so on. Also, if the meter is designed to check in regularly to report usage, it may not have a buffer (especially across power failures) to hold a month's worth of data (possibly not even an accurate clock to track usage that long).
Re:Why not put a microcell in a van? (Score:5, Interesting)
Smart meters also don't have to use cellular connectivity at all. Here in North America there's a licensed RF option, where the meters report back to the utility in almost real time. More distant meters that can't reach the utility's "hub" can use intervening meters to relay their reports back to the mothership. They've gone through a few M&As but I think this is their current owner [sensus.com], I've seen some of the backend systems the utilities use for these deployments, and a buddy of mine works on the meters themselves. It's really cool kit and my current electric utility uses it. Most of the time I can get near real time (updates within 24 hours) graphs of my electrical usage from their webpage. The utility gets it hourly (the delay I think is for the data to filter down to the consumer facing webpage)
There are also unlicensed options in the 900MHz ISM band that basically work the same way. I've lived places where the utility used these. They're ALMOST as good as the aforementioned licensed kit. The only real difference is the utility seems to deploy a lot more "hubs", Entergy rolled these out, and roughly every kilometer or so you'd see a telephone pole with a receiving antenna. With the licensed option above I've yet to spot the utility's receiving antennas, I presume they need a lot less of them because of the "relay" functionality baked into the solution, plus licensed RF, so less interference to overcome.
Really, there's no need at all to rely on cellular backhaul for smart electric meters, unless we're going to talk about really rural areas, but in those areas cellular reception itself is not a guarantee, so...... :-)
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In the UK some smart meters use the customer's WiFi too. Typically they have a dongle that plugs into the router, which has its own sub-1GHz radio module.
The problem with these sub-1GHz systems is that the rules on the amount of data that can be sent are quite limiting. In the UK for ISM bands it's 1% duty cycle, i.e. 1 second of transmission in every 100 second period. It's worse than that though, because the data rate is typically quite low, and due to those radios being fairly long range there are a lot
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I'm not aware of any duty cycle requirements on ISM in the US. There were analog devices (cordless phones, baby monitors, etc.) on it back in the day and those have 100% duty cycle. The licensed solution seems like a no brainer from the utility's point of view, FCC licensing costs aren't that onerous, and you can actually do something about unwanted interference.
Still, I've seen major utilities that went "all in" on the unlicensed path, so it can't be all bad.
And then there are the infrastructure costs. Base stations needed covering the whole country.
The unlicensed deployments I've seen had b
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Sub GHz is lower data rate, but that's not a big issue since the amount of data collected is relatively small. Now if they all go to a common base station that would be more difficult. Some systems use mesh networking, so they're shorter hops. I know someone working in that arena, but I don't what what the ratio of base stations to devices is.
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We have the RF network for smart meters too but it all needs setting up at install time so if you want to swap comms methods you still need a tech.
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There are a ton of backhauls available. There's the licensed 220MHz band, which is considered a very low bandwidth mechanism. There's also 900MHz, which allows for higher bandwidth. Both of these communicate to collectors that are mounted somewhere within range. However, most of these meters will be mesh networked, so a particular meter may not see the collector, in which case its readings are forwarded along to one that can.This can result in a few meters pinging their readings around the neighborhood.
Then
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Yeah, my utility (a municipal-owned not-for-profit) built out a fiber optic network to the curb in part to handle smart meters. I don't know the details, I assume it's RF from the meter to a backhaul in the area (e.g. like wifi to an AP, they could put a receiver at the transformer). I know I can see usage in 15 minute intervals (although not until the next day). They also have gas and water meters with some sort of wireless connection; I think the water meter might be powered by the water movement itself,
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At PG&E, we can get 15 minute intervals as a graph, which is interesting. The meters are using sub-GHz channels, same as the older cordless phones, some intercoms, baby monitors, etc (it's a crowded band and getting worse).
Re: Why not put a microcell in a van? (Score:2)
With my Raintorest Eagle and PG&E smartmeter, I get real time wattage with 15 second resolution. Then I tie it all up nicely with Home Assistant which also monitors my solar PV system, as well as smartplugs and many appliances
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They also have nothing to do with "cost savings to households from knowing the amount of energy they are consuming was pegged at £19.5 billion ($23.6 billion)", which should really be stated as "when someone was asked to pull a random figure out of their arse that they could claim it makes everyone better off by, they decided on £19.5 billion". Smart meters are there to save power companies the cost of sending meter readers round, period. Everything else is just incidental.
And for
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Not all utilities bill monthly. Ignore your monthly bill a couple of times and the utility can switch to prepay. This is one of the reasons where some communication to the server is required. The other is different pricing for different time of day (for example cheaper electric power in the night).
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Some meter types actually do involve a truck that roams slowly through a neighborhood to read the meters over the air from the street.
Re: Why not put a microcell in a van? (Score:2)
15 minutes to the utility.
But over Zigbee with a Rainforest Eagle I get 15 second resolution.
2033??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it shocking that the article reports that the U.K. is keeping 2G and 3G for another ten years when it's mostly already shut down here in the USA. I haven't heard about this being a big problem here. Many meters have to be replaced periodically anyway, so they'll mostly be swapped out in ten years without even paying attention to this issue.
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I find it shocking that the article reports that the U.K. is keeping 2G and 3G for another ten years when it's mostly already shut down here in the USA. I haven't heard about this being a big problem here.
I recall it being a big deal for connected cars when this shutdown happened here. Mostly it meant older Chevys would no longer have working OnStar capabilities.
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Replacing an electric meter is a service outage. I had mine done twice in the early 2010s, very unfun. Second because the first broke.
I don't think the plan was to replace it again within 10 years.
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My experience was a bit different; the technician cut the seal, pulled the meter with the little ark shield tool, dropped it in the box, picked up the new meter with the same tool, inserted it and power was back on. Extra 30 seconds to seal it and a minute to do the paperwork. I was down less than 30 seconds.
My utility has a really dumb system; it reports to the SCADA system once a day with 15-minute interval information. But it sure as heck doesn't rely on a third party for communication...
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3G gets shut down, 2G doesn't for a while.
The 2G applications are mostly M2M (machine to machine - like IoT but without the IP). There's a *lot* of those. Not just smart meters, but elevator monitoring systems (some are governed by regulations which *require* an emergency phone call to be made as a "regular" phone call), container and equipment tracking (think construction sites), and so on.
Shutting off 3G isn't so bad for them because these things are typically very low-usage applications. They send data e
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When Germany switched off 3G, it has caused a lot of problems for the customers of my previous employer since their vehicle tracking devices for which they have paid a lot of money only supported 2G and 3G, and 2G was too slow for some of the use cases.
It actually sort of caused me a headache only a couple of weeks ago when I have received such a vehicle tracking device that does support 4G, but has been misconfigured for 3G only by the manufacturer.
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I haven't heard about this being a big problem here.
This may be like saying I'm not affected by the transition to EVs since I don't have a car. The USA was quite laggard in the adoption of smart meters making the problem far smaller. Yes the population is larger, but population scales with resources so the number of energy companies, technicians, etc is proportionally larger as well. The USA's general cultural mentality of being "anti corporate tracking" has really helped in this regard.
Also many meters in the USA didn't rely on mobile infrastructure. They u
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"The mobile network operators have confirmed that they do not intend to offer 2G and 3G mobile networks past 2033 at the latest. We welcome that some individual operators will switch off their networks, particularly their 3G networks, earlier than this date, and will announce their own plans about when and how they intend to do this."
And according to this https://www.emnify.com/blog/gl... [emnify.com] 3G gets shut down 2023-2025.
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2G and 3G shutdown was a big deal in the US, but mostly for business customers with old equipment. I worked on upgrading some products to 3G and 4G due to the 2G switch off. Generally it was a case of ripping the old one out and turning it into e-waste.
A few engineers managed to convince management to put the modem on a separate module that the customer could swap out, or at least be replaced at the factory.
The UK tends to be quite conservative about these things. We have had DAB radio for a long time, but
Planned obsolescence... (Score:3)
What about excluding 4G or 5G connectivity, which will likely put you in the same situation 30 years from now?
Locally in the US, the meters are read by energy company trucks, which just drive through the neighborhood and read them through some sort of short range RF. There's no third party service involved, so they're in full control of their destiny. Of course, the one true "future proof" tech is to just go back to people reading the meters by sight.
Re:Planned obsolescence... (Score:5, Insightful)
Locally in the US, the meters are read by energy company trucks, which just drive through the neighborhood and read them through some sort of short range RF.
That might be the case for some utility companies, but the ones in my neighborhood most definitely are the smart kind which can track your usage by the hour. I can go on FPL's site right now and see the spike from last night when my partner got home and plugged in his EV. If I was one of those people who was paranoid about privacy issues, I'd actually find this a little creepy.
I have no idea what sort of connectivity they're actually using. I'm fairly certain aside from being an inconvenience because it would knock out power to your home in the process, doing a teardown of your power meter is most likely illegal.
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This [sensus.com] is one solution. It's essentially a mesh network, the meters form a network amongst themselves until they reach a meter that can communicate with the "mothership". It works over licensed frequencies. There are also unlicensed options that work in the ISM bands. I don't know if any of the unlicensed ones can do a mesh, when I've had utilities that use those they have a lot more base stations/receivers than the licensed option. My guess is they don't mesh, but I could be wrong.
You absolutely should
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> doing a teardown of your power meter is most likely illegal
Not sure about the US but in the UK the power meter is no way yours. Unless it is within your property the energy company are able to access it and do waht they need/want to do. They only avoid changing the meter without informing you because they want to avoid the consequences of you phoning up and complaining that X Y or Z lost power and it cause issues A B or C.
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It depends on the flavour of 4G. There are different types, including some that are designed for low data rate, longer range IoT stuff like smart meters. The idea is that the cell operator can provide a long term service guarantee, and even when they have moved on to 17G or whatever they can keep the IoT part of their 4G network alive.
Consumers don't have access to it, you need a special industrial cellular modem.
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What about excluding 4G or 5G connectivity, which will likely put you in the same situation 30 years from now?
What's more efficient, setting up and rolling out your own infrastructure competing with existing wide area data services and requiring separate bandwidth, towers, and equipment... or just reflecting on the fact that your smart meter full of electronics will need replacing every 30 years anyway?
The issue with 3G meters is they came waaaaay late to the market when 3G was past maturity. 4G meters don't make sense, but 5G do. That network will likely outlive any meter installed.
So they have been negligent in the past 5 years? (Score:2)
Is it really news that 2G & 3G services will be switched off eventually? What have they been planning in the last 5-10 years?
I work in IT, and I have seen many many cases of teams/individuals never looking past the next year, and then act surprised when they find out some critical component their system relied on will be shutdown/migrated/upgraded/end-of-support next year, when such thing had been announced 5 years ago.
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We wont let them install Smart Meters here in the UK for one or more of the following reasons:
1. We cant be bothered. Existing meter works fine.
2. We don't believe the CGI Einstein on TV that tells us it somehow will save us money. People who care about cost of energy use have been turning stuff off at the wall since they were kids, a silly little delicate display panel that run on batteries or needs charging or gets smashed by the kids or the cat pisses on it isnt going to make it (the switch on the wall)
Wait (Score:2)
You mean to tell me no one considered this very likely scenario where these devices would need to be replaced?
We truly are governed by the worst of us.
Damn expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
>$17 billion billion
Cheaper to just hire meter readers
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not if they are union
Re: Damn expensive (Score:3)
So much effort and expense spent on these smart meters here in the UK. Meanwhile, my ca. 1955 electrical meter keeps quietly spinning away and the number dial on my gas meter keeps updating. Itâ(TM)s just two minutes a month for me to report the numbers, which I donâ(TM)t mind. Furthermore, weâ(TM)re on a special unmetered water rate, so no meter for that either.. Not sure what a smart meter could do for me because I donâ(TM)t see what I could shift to low peak times, and nor do I car
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In the past, they simply put in 2 or 3 physical meters &
Re: Damn expensive (Score:2)
None of which I can do. I get your point, but it doesnâ(TM)t seem very applicable. I live in an upstairs maisonette (flat/apartment) and I donâ(TM)t have a car or a dishwasher. If I run the washing machine at night, it wakes us and the neighbours up. I donâ(TM)t have room for a hot water tank (maybe get rid of the TV?), so Iâ(TM)m not sure how the switch to electric is supposed to work let alone worry about heating water at an off-peak rate. The good news of all this though is that m
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> It's so they can charge different rates at different times of the day & week, which they hope will encourage people to do some energy intensive stuff like using washing machines, dishwashers, or charging EVs at the cheaper times.
Precisely what I'm dead set against. I can do the washing overnight during a cheap rate, with a old fashioned economy 7 plan. Which uses only ONE meter, just with two readings.
Thing is, while everyone sleeps and does the washing overnight, well that low demand time sudden
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Thing is, while everyone sleeps and does the washing overnight, well that low demand time suddenly becomes a new demand time doesn't it?
Yes. And it is artificial, so crappy for long term capacity planning, unless they expect it to now always be artificial.
They will tell you when to do your laundry, and it will change regularly. Resist at your financial peril.
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So much effort and expense spent on these smart meters here in the UK. Meanwhile, my ca. 1955 electrical meter keeps quietly spinning away and the number dial on my gas meter keeps updating. Itâ(TM)s just two minutes a month for me to report the numbers, which I donâ(TM)t mind. Furthermore, weâ(TM)re on a special unmetered water rate, so no meter for that either.. Not sure what a smart meter could do for me because I donâ(TM)t see what I could shift to low peak times, and nor do I care to know how much energy we are using right now. Itâ(TM)s not like I want a monitor cluttering up somewhere, collecting dust, or imagine Iâ(TM)d pay much attention to it after a few weeks (at least thatâ(TM)s my experience from a previous home).
Same. I phone in my meter readings (gas and electric) once a month. If you don't, they put you on the schedule for an actual meter reader person. Same with water but it is quarterly.
Smart meters are mostly so they can charge you more using time of day as an excuse for poor capacity planning. Saving on meter readers is just a bonus for them.
What sort? (Score:2)
What sort of meters are these? NatGas, Electric power, or water?
Re: What sort? (Score:2)
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Electricity and Gas. We have one that was just showing the electricity for a few months, but then they connected the gas to it when we complained.
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> What sort of meters are these? NatGas, Electric power, or water?
Any and all. Typically will be electric and gas. I see less people with smart gas meters and very few have smart water meters as the water companies still have meter readers and you are not allowed to phone in water meter readings anyway.
Awww, no more billing.. (Score:2)
It couldn't have happened to a nicer machine.
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Meters show numbers on them. There will definitely still be billing, and bonus points is that you get to deal with additional paperwork, requests and inspections.
How many gaggles fit in a Library of Congress? (Score:2)
I worked on the standard for the UK meters (Score:5, Informative)
*Change to a longer elliptic curve for signing because the NA curve only had 83 bits security but then changed the order of the certificate fields to create a hash collision attack that was only 64 bits. (then denied the attack was possible and then lied about fixing it)
Couldn't agree on the connector between the communication module into the home and the communication module to the utility so put a wireless network inside the meter.
*Added a device that could top up the meter (debit device) but then added a layer of security that meant this device had to always be connected to the network. My original design allowed the device to be battery operated. Always on the network means it has to be mains powered, powered by the house who you want to top up the meter for because the power has been shut off.
*One vendor's application couldn't tell if a network layer message delivery had succeeded so slipped in a mandatory application acknowledgement of some messages. This caused a number of existing North American devices to no longer pass the standard.
*There was the idea that all kinds of smart devices could save you money by knowing the price of electricity and reacting to price changes. The savings in places like Oklahoma had been $50 per month in pilots. Except the UK added so many hoops it made it pretty much impossible for these devices to join the smart meter network.
Then there were the EU incentives for the role out. There was a subsidy for utilities to buy in home displays to show consumers their consumption and their usage. The incentive was to buy not actually deploy and warehouse space is cheaper than buying devices that actually work and deploying them so you can guess what happened.
At one point in the standards process I was actually physically threatened for delaying the approval because it didn't matter if the standard worked, as long as there was a standard these companies could be paid.
This is a UK report, but... (Score:2)
Years ago when Arizona Public Service introduced smart meters in my northern Arizona town, the local hippie moms protested against them on grounds that they "emit radiation" that would make everyone grow extra fingers and possibly even vote Republican By "radiation" they meant the periodic cellular data squirts that keep the electric company informed on my usage hourly and daily, rather than once a month. This helps them assess demand and plan infrastructure.
My response to the protest was to be first to vol
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The other main problem (Score:2)
remote dataloggers (Score:2)
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Other meters, non-prepay ones are supposed to simply go "dumb" and basically turn off all smart functionality making you wonder why you had one installed in the first place!
Never saw the point in the first place anyway. It's not like they some how use less energy. The only actual benefit of it seems to be more granular breakdown of cost but that doesn't seem worth it.
Re:You also melt the part that turns the power on (Score:5, Insightful)
The only actual benefit of it seems to be more granular breakdown of cost but that doesn't seem worth it.
There's a benefit, it's just not to you. The power company doesn't have to send a dude to your house to read the meter every month. And they don't have to send someone over to disconnect your service when you miss your payment by 30 seconds. Now it's all just a couple of keystrokes from some call-center lackey.
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Awww good for them.
Some bloke in a van is made redundant with all his mates at xmas just so rich leccy company execs can have more profits.
Must be Ferengi
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There's more to it than meter reading, and the utilities still employ a lot of on the ground service guys in trucks. There are still meter readers, but they're mostly to satisfy the loud and annoying people who claim to have RF allergies.
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> Never saw the point in the first place anyway
There is no point (in going dumb), that is a symptom of bad design which they are "working on".
> It's not like they some how use less energy. The only actual benefit of it seems to be more granular breakdown of cost but that doesn't seem worth it.
Correct it isnt worth it. They are looking at more creative ways to bill you to make more money. For example, these meters can bill you for apparent power and not just actual power ( I may have mixed the terms)
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For a good primer on how VARs affect an electrical grid see here;
https://cleanenergygrid.org/wp... [cleanenergygrid.org]
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The ones I know of stop functioning - no power at all, not just removal of smart monitoring. The "smarts' do a lot of things, and not lowering the manual labor cost of meter reading. They can monitor the state of the power lines, which can optimize the delivery of power (three-phase AC to the neighborhood needs balancing). They can provide time-of-day pricing which can actually save the consumer money, and so forth. The monitoring can help prevent brownouts, even more if there's a load balancing system (
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People are stupid and give stupid advice. That "heat gun" could well burn down the house and land the one doing it in prison.
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Smart meters transmit data every 30 mins.
You will need a lot of "trucks" and also, a truck wouldn't get down my road.
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The provincial power company here tried to get the Utilities Board to allow them to install many millions of dollars worth of smart meters and allow them to charge more for electricity in order to pay for them. The Utilities Board consulted with the public, who overwhelmingly said "fuck no, what's in it for ME?".
We avoided that fiasco, but the power company keeps moaning about it every now and then.