What's the reason to avoid smart meters?

The security is broken and it broadcasts your information in the clear. I set up a RTLSDR plugged into my laptop in my kitchen and was able to read the energy utilization of my entire neighborhood after about 10min of work.

> The security is broken and it broadcasts your information in the clear. I set up a RTLSDR plugged into my laptop in my kitchen and was able to read the energy utilization of my entire neighborhood after about 10min of work.

In America, yes. Here the meter->gateway is encrypted zigbee, the gateway is over 3/4g.

However the remote contactor is more of an issue. You can be turned off remotely without much ceremony.

Where does "here" mean.

In the UK only "central" England and south transmits data over the mobile network. In northern England and Scotland, the data is transmitted over UHF radio.

Sorry yes, I should have been more specific. The important thing is that it is reasonably well encrypted. Its not like the USA where they just yeet it in the clear for all to see.

The downside is that the non cellular backhaul is provided by arquiva, who are shits.

what information is it actually leaking though?

If someone wanted, they could drive up to my house and see the colour of my door. The fact that someone has always been able to create a database of front door colours isn't inherently a data leak.

A UUID and electricity usage for the past half hour for a house in the general vicinity isn't useful. Even if you could put a name to that UUID, I struggle to think of how that would be a major issue. Especially considering with a thermal camera, and assuming construction details from the age and type of the house, you could already estimate your neighbours energy usage anyway.

Remote shutoff on the other hand....

Could you perhaps use it to monitor which houses are unoccupied?

Because they're designed for demand side load shedding.

Also to enable "surge pricing" such that folks ration of disconnect themselves, rather than pay the surge price.

Other than that, they don't really have a benefit for the user, the details one variable use could simply be monitored by manual reading on a weekly basis.

Get a solar system and it can run the meter in reverse. Which is cool!

> Avoid smart meters at all costs

I don't mind smart meters; it's nice getting the metrics and data from them.

I do avoid variable rate billing though.

Variable billing can save you a lot of money, especially if you have your own generation capacity - PV panels, wind/water turbine etc - by making it possible to schedule maximum use during low-price (usually during the night, sometimes in the middle of the day) while minimising use during the morning and afternoon peaks. Play this right and you'll end up with negative electricity bills (in regions where small-scale producers can sell to the market, Sweden being an example of such). Contracts often stipulate that small-scale producers can not produce more kWh than they consume. By scheduling consumption so that it either falls during times of excess own production - which makes it possible to avoid paying energy taxes and transport charges or when the market rates are the lowest you end up with as low a bill as possible. At the same time you can decide to export power to the network when you happen to have excess capacity at high-price moments thereby maximising income from electricity sales. Play this right and you'll end up with net-negative electricity bills even while producing no more kWh than you consume.

I'd look more into it - Octopus Agile can save you a heap of money, doubly so if you have Solar + Battery so can more effectively load balance.

And Intelligent Octopus Go is a variable rate - 7p 23:30-05:30 (and any time during the day your EV is plugged in and there's a glut of green cheap energy on the grid).

Variable rate smart billing can be amazing if you have the right setup though!

Eg. An electric car that can do V2G with the following;

Power to the grid when Rate > Y and carCharge > 50%

Charge the car when Rate < X.

There's various posts on electric car groups where people have the above setup and pull in ridiculous profits. Your typical electric car can output power for a very long time during the ridiculous 10000% price hikes and on the flipside when the price occasionally hits ~0 charging is basically free.

If you have some system of power storage variable rate can make you money.

https://thedriven.io/2024/02/27/australian-evs-could-earn-12...

> on the flipside when the price occasionally hits ~0 charging is basically free.

Not where I live - Sweden - since there is a fixed energy tax raised on electricity. We buy electricity on the artificial 'Nord Pool' market at market rates + 2.5 öre (1 öre is 1/100 Swedish krona, at current exchange rates 1 öre is about equal to $0.009) surcharge which means that the actual electricity costs are 0 when the market rate is at -0.025 SEK/kWh. Such a 'free' kWh costs us around 0.88 SEK due to:

- 0.4280 SEK energy tax

- + 25% 'value-added tax' on top of that tax (yes, tax on tax is a thing here) makes this 0.5350 SEK/kWh

- 0.34 SEK//kWh 'transport charge' (this includes 25% value-added tax)

All this means the market rate per kWh has to fall below 0.905 SEK/kWh for electricity to actually be 'free'. This has happened but fortunately this is a rarity. Fortunately? Yes, of course. This basically only happens when there is a large discrepancy between electricity production and electricity demand/transport capacity which in turn lead to excessive voltage and frequency in the distribution network which in turn can lead to the network going off-line.

And then you get some big energy dry spell and rates go to 1,000x their normal price and it starts costing you $20 to run the kettle for a few minutes.

Hopefully you noticed that spike in prices ahead of time!

The fixed rates that companies charge just smooth out these variances since they all pay a variable rate behind the scenes. The fixed rate providers will do rolling brownouts if the grid gets to this state to save themselves from ruin. If you're on a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off in these periods.

Essentially the downside you mention is worse on the fixed rate: On fixed rate you'll have no power at all - the fixed rate providers will cut power completely to protect themselves financially if the grid is in a prolonged period of extreme price (they did this in Texas). On a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off or not.

The second part is indeed wrong: most consumer energy markets have a wholesale market and grid operator, and the grid operator is ultimately responsible for the call on brown-outs. The companies that sell electricity retail to invididual homes are generally buying on that wholesale market, but they're not in a position to cut off their customers: there's straight-up no mechanism to do that on a moment's notice, because the grid-level control doesn't overlap with the retail seller's customers (these retail companies are often basically just a financial instrument that turns the combination of variable wholesale and grid operator fees into a fixed price bill and some customer support: your neighbour can buy from a completely different company and if anyone wants to shut off you but not them they need to come to your house and physically disconnect the lines). What happens in a situation like texas is that the retail companies who are selling at a fixed price start losing money fast, and can't really do anything about it in the short term. If they've built up enough of a buffer from their margins, they may survive, or they may go bankrupt and their customers will need to move to a different provider, but that's a process that takes weeks to months, not minutes in a price spike.

(A similar thing happened in the UK: there weren't any brown-outs, but the spike in wholesale energy prices sent a lot of smaller retail energy companies under. If you were with one of them, like I was, you had no interruption to your supply and in fact won out compared to those on variable tarrifs: the losers were the investors in the retail companies and those who they were unable to pay).

I will agree in general though: unless you have particularly unusual energy consumption habits, or think that the energy market will go up more than the retail companies thing they will, you'll probably win out on a variable rate contract over time, especially if you have a battery to time-shift your consumption (And with the most common UK provider for this, there is still a cap on how much you'll pay, even if wholesale prices skyrocket like they did in Texas).

> if anyone wants to shut off you but not them they need to come to your house and physically disconnect the line

I'm not in the UK, but I gather my utility can do a radio controlled disconnect (they may need to come onsite to reconnect). I would hope that wouldn't be used to enable a virtual brown out for customers of a particular energy marketplace, but I think it's a capability of many communicating meters.

> they did this in Texas

That is not what happened in Texas. The REPs had zero say to do a rolling brownout. "Rolling" outages which became semi-permanent outages were done by the delivery companies, not the retail providers. Retail providers can't just choose to stop selling me electricity for a few hours because they think it's too unprofitable for them, that's not allowed in the contract. My REP at the time probably had some massive costs due to customers like me which didn't lose power; they folded and sold the contract to another company.

> On a variable rate you can choose to cut yourself off or not.

Once again, you clearly don't know what actually happened in Texas. Several people I know on variable rate plans lost power for days.

But hey keep speaking falsehoods instead of actually learning what happened.

This smells like an advert. Over the last year I've spent less money on energy by being on Octopus Tracker (which requires a smart meter) over any fixed tariff.

Many have also not and are switching away from Agile.

It hit £1 a couple of weeks ago. Ouch

It's cheap if you use the majority of your energy in the wee hours right?

This is a deeply flawed but empathetic point of view. Sure, maybe the big bad smart meters are secretly conspiring against you. If things were so simple, why doesn’t someone in the government just negotiate a simple price for everyone? Why have middlemen like you at all?

Disclosure: I have a house battery.

over the last three months, I've been paying on average 16p a unit. Thats with a car as well. On the days in the winter when solar isn't doing shit, we top up at the lowest price that day.

This kinda goes to the articles point which is to you can avoid, or limit the peak with local storage.

The issue with the battery is that its costs a shit tonne. a basic battery is going to cost something like £8k installed.

Its almost certainly cheaper to upgrade the grid compared to adding batteries to a million households. Especially as the lifespan of batteries isn't that long compared to the super grid.

The unsaid, "quiet part" about batteries is that they're a fire hazard. No matter how "safe" they are branded as, the failure mode is disastrous and life-threatening when they do fail. It's insane that those things are being sold and installed in homes at all. But then again this is in a country where installing solar power inverters in the attic of wooden houses was also a thing (no surprises as to what the outcome of a failure would be).

Proper solution is to pool them in a dedicated buildings so you still get the benefit of locality at the neighborhood level while containing the consequences of a failure and limiting them to property damage (vs potential loss of life), but that would use up land that can otherwise be used as a way to (literally) seek rent, so it cannot happen.

> about batteries is that they're a fire hazard.

yes, although they are statistically much safer than fridges, or combined washer driers. (unless you include cheap e-bikes or hoverboards...)

I don't have mine inside the house, its very much outside with a wooden lintel supporting a surprisingly sandy flower trough.

I also have micro inverters, because they are more efficient, and less fucking noisy. They are also, as you hint at, much safer. Partly because they are not switching ~400v DC but also because they don't need to handle as much power.

As fire risks go, house batteries are pretty low on the list. You're much more likely to have a catasrophic fire from charging one of the many battery-powered gadgets that people have nowawdays (especially cheap low-quality ones!).

Sorry, but this feels entirely wrong.

If I didn't have a smart meter my levellised cost of energy wouldn't be negative like it is now (EV tariff + Solar + Battery).