In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from the money lost from chasing up issues where people are trying to cheat the system.
In this example it really makes me wonder if replacing all the meters in the country with non-intercompatible smart meters really saves that much money. So you have to start asking what else is in there for them to do this. Probably money for the data I would have to imagine.
Also, given how absolutely atrociously shite the security of these smart meters is (and you'll have to trust me on this, I don't know how public this information is) I wouldn't want that crap anywhere near my house in the eventuality that someone hijacks it to make it look like I'm using more electricity when they're using less (while keeping the overall books balanced so to speak) or some other nefarious purpose.
Certainly these meters won't give you 5G cancer, but they're really a horrible idea as they stand and I don't recommend anyone install them, at least not in the UK.
OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates, which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning such sales, not banning smart meters.
TOU rates are a thing you can get with pre-programmed meters. They may not benefit the utility company as much as tailored rates but they probably have 90% of the benefit while having 0% of the privacy implications.
The companies don't even have to sell the data, they can just mine it for information, such as which rate to automatically put you on once your contract finishes to make the most money out of you etc.
The energy usage tracking can be done without smart meters, in this country electricity companies (and lots of private companies) offered induction clamp based electrical usage logging devices. These may not have been quite as accurate as onboard measuring but this could have easily been solved with some kind of serial protocol exposed on the meter which a third party datalogger could attach to. The ability to track energy usage is not a feature of a smart meter, it's just a feature of having access to the meter's data, this data could always have been made available even if the meter wasn't networked.
Open banking is a complete disaster that I seriously don't think deserves the name "open". I still don't understand how an API which requires you to be a BANK to be able to interact with can remotely claim to be open but having tested some of the implementation for banks it's some horrific over-engineered mess.
Let's hope the data access API for your meter doesn't require you to be an electricity company to access it. As it stands, in the UK, meters are not intercompatible between utility companies so if you switch providers (which I do annually) the old smart meter just becomes a dumb meter again.
However, you are incorrect that meters are incompatible between utility companies. You are right that SMETS1 meters _are_ incompatible. However, all new meter installations are SMETS2 and these are fully compatible between energy companies.
SMETS2 has been the standard for a number of years now. There are still old SMETS1 installations still active though.
Right now it’s factories and a few early adopters like me, but anyone can sign up for it and it’s substantially cheaper assuming you don’t mind turning things off at peak times.
I say this as an electronics and software engineer. Companies doing have our best interests in mind.
Want to refute that claim? Show me the source code then
With that in mind what could they “infer”?
I go weeks without triggering a single bit of usage on my meter. I bet you they aren’t thinking: this guy is mining heaps of crypto.
Are these relatively minor invasions of privacy compared to what advertising companies perform? Yes. But that's no reason to pretend that they aren't privacy-hostile moves on their own.
Thermostat heating ruin your wake up time theories.
And you avoided my actual point: a battery and solar/wind hides all of this,
Are you honesty making the point that: knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto your property and read a number, as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).
What am I missing?
Personally, I think so for most people. But that depends on how much privacy your property provides from pedestrians and where your meter is located.
However, that is orthogonal to the debate since there are other options. Some places allow self reporting and Automated Meter Reading can be done without a smart meter that reports live power usage.
I am unsure why you are so vested in arguing that nobody has a legitimate reason to be concerned about this. It is fine if it doesn't bother you, but it is really necessary to paint those with different concerns as irrational?
There are clear benefits to real-time monitoring of power. So far I’ve only heard made up, theoretical, what if, privacy concerns.
You haven't done that though. You've made accusations of irrationality without ever once backing them up.
> So far I’ve only heard made up, theoretical, what if, privacy concerns.
I think engineers have am ethical duty to consider "theoretical" privacy concerns when they are working on new technology.
Given the history of data mining and brokerage in the US, I would be willing to make significant bets that, (in the absence of a new law being passed to prohibit it,) consumer power usage patterns from smart meters will be sold to data brokers. Pretending this isn't going to happen belies either your knowledge of the existing markets for data or your own rationality.
Me: how so, there is way too much noise (generation and storage) to get signal (usage correlation). In real life smart meters allow for all sorts of benefits/innovation (time of use charges, time off user feed in)
You: you haven’t said anything, just wild accusations of irrationality. Privacy is a concern, data harvesting!!! Pretending this isn’t going to happen is crazy.
Wtf? Smart meters exist, and this hasn’t happened. Show me one instance. Time of use charges are a thing, look them up. Using electrical usage data to gather private information is not a thing. Look that up too.
Watching a meter spin or reading it once a month you can tell if someone is on vacation. Isn't that equally private and personal information?
A rough inference of which months might involve vacations (data about which is probably already being sold from other sources) is far less invasive than a daily record of your sleep cycle.
With the lack of privacy laws in the US, it is pretty much a given that this data will be sold as soon as the private utility companies in the US start collecting it.
And your privacy concerns are just a matter of granularity of time. You report your usage monthly -- that is also private information. Smart meters just do it on a finer timescale. Not a fundamental difference.
Anyway, back to the main topic.
Yes, granularity of the measurements IS a problem. If these things only reported the readings when I pressed a button, I would not be so concerned about privacy (that is if the companies could prove to me that the meters did not report the readings outside of these times).
Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market.
Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a right to not have complex terms of usage?
You want the best of both worlds. Maybe that's not possible.
Utilities are complicated. There's no such thing as delivering and not failing to deliver.
This is the profession where getting an SOE imaged machine in a new employees hands on their first day is considered a big achievement.
> How hard can it be? If a ethernet cable fails it's not as though it will electrocute the worker or flood a town downstream.
Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it. This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.
I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal information. Why is a smart meter so different?
A spinning meter can be manually checked to find out if someone is on vacation, but doing that is slow and isn't very worthwhile for criminals. Being able to monitor 100,000 meters at once for empty homes might suddenly be very economical for criminals.
- When you’ve gone on vacation and your home is unattended.
- When you have an additional tenant, a long-term houseguest, have a new significant other or even have a baby.
- Whether or not you’re actually working when you’re working from home.
- Homes that use greater than X amount of electricity are at greater risk of Y and so your home owners/rental/car insurance premium goes up.
- People who play computer/video games late at night are at higher risk for health issues is your health insurance premium goes up.
And I bet there are other, much more subtle things they could figure out once given the opportunity to vacuum up your data: like estimate what temperature you set your AC to and determine whether or not someone in the house was awake at any given moment of any given day.
This seems to be an annoying issue. Any serious proponent of privacy is already taking steps to hold on its vestiges, which include not taking a public stance on it.
There is a solution: Google writes the software. The utility company runs it.
The problem right now is that Google takes too many roles.
So I hope that gives some perspective why people may prever to keep an old system around and not be forced by a big company to change it.
Perhaps this is a fundamental limitation of digital technology, if not all technology
Being the vastly more flexible party in any interaction with it, we tend to adapt to its particular set of affordances and constraints
This is often useful but opening any one door will close others: deployment at scale carries sociotechnical inertia
It also frequently inverts the agentic orientation: we build tools, use them, and before long find ourselves used by them
For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically), but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how it’s being metered.
So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business.
Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.