Stephen Temple

When the subject of “smart meters” was first brought to my attention it seemed such a simple technical issue. On the contrary is has proved to be like peeling back layers of an onion and where I finished up was a realisation that the real challenges were not technical at all…as my journey of discovery will now reveal.

All I had as my  starting point was the media understanding, no doubt fed by the last government, that “the smart meter” was a pretty display to be mounted in our homes for informing us of our electricity demand and allowing us to make informed decisions. In this direction of travel I had soon made the obvious leap that mounting a display in some fixed location in the home was not the most intelligent way to spend billions of pounds. At least a communications links needed to be added to take the information to where somebody could view it where they were…so why not the mobile phone…after all we now all carry one around?

A very good friend and colleague soon put me right. For smart meters to be “smart” they have to act on the data rather than just passing it on to a human being simply to look at.

This was pretty insightful.  I was now at first base but where did this take me?  The obvious technical answer was the automatic means to switch off devices around the home at times when this was required by the electricity grid. The technical solution would surely boil down to something like short range radio links between the smart meter and electricty consuming devices like our dishwashers and washing machines.

Unknowingly I had cross the line from “the smart meter” to “the smart grid”.

What was a “smart grid”?  An expert on the matter helpfully explained  that it was the added “intelligence” in the electricity grid that would allow electricty demand to be matched to the highly fluctuating energy supply being generated from renewable energy sources that the UK has committed to have in place by 2020. Put simply we all have to use less electricty when the wind stops blowing or clouds obscure the sun. The consequence of not doing so would be the need to have a large capacity of oil, gas or coal fired powered stations standing idly by just in reserve to plug the energy shortfalls in the unpredictable lulls in solar or wind energy.

Well I was now at second base but it was far from clear how the devices in my home would know when the wind was not blowing off the North coast of Scotland? This had me foxed for a while until a University economics boffin explained to me that the information would be communicated to the customer by a truly whopping great spike in the cost of electricity via the spot market for electricity. Re-enter the “smart meter”…whose “smartness” turned out to have very little to do with pretty displays but whose main function was to be able to measure our consumption, second by second, rather than just the accumulated total over the meter reading period. In this way our friendly electricty supplier could send us a huge bill shock that would galvanise us all into buying home networks that switch off all possible devices when one of these price spikes hits the spot market.

I had arrived, a little bruised, at third base…as yet another technical solution loomed up as the right technical route. In this the broadband “always on” connection would keep our home networks informed of the spot price of electricty and our PC would have a list of all the devices we could temporarily do without. Anything that used electricity would have a smart plug that could be address (by whatever means) to toggle the electricity supply on or off to that device in a split seconds.  Some clever bit of software would now order our lives around the spot price of electricity. When the wind off the coast of Scotland stopped blowing or clouds appeared over Southern England our toasters would instantly deny us toast, the washing would not get washed and we would have to walk to work as our electric cars would not have been re-charged the previous evening.

At the end of my voyage of discovery about smart meters I arrived at three surprising conclusions.

First there are no technical challenges to smart meters or for that matter smart grids. All the technology exists today to implement them.

Second, it was the politics that looked horrendously difficult. How many consumers are prepared to have their lives intimately wrapped around the weather when mankind’s progress has been largely about insulating all our lives from it?  How high do these prices spikes have to be to change behaviour in the average home and particularly where the electricity bill probably does not rank in the top half dozen items of most household expenditures? And if they are high enough to get us all to fit automated home energy management systems – where does this leave the very poor or those in rented properties? And are the incentives enough for a householder to take the trouble to be in for the electricity man to fit a smart meter when its main economic function is to introduce a more uncertain pricing model?

My final conclusion is that perhaps the most urgent national investment we should be making in renewable energy is not in wind and solar (with all their short term unpredictability) but in tidal energy (eg the seven barrage) where at least the energy output is highly predictable and could be coupled with controlled charging windows for the anticipated rising population of electric cars. Perhaps we might call it “the really Smart Investment”…since the world “smart” seems to be an essential marketing wrapper in this debate!

(Footnote: Sadly since this blog was written the Government has decided against building the seven barrage….a project I have always found far more compelling than high speed trains…but it is better for hard decisions to be taken than endless discussion…and for that the Government  deserves credit)