Smart meters need smart stats

Apparently my street is about to get updated to having Smart Meters, at least according to the sales guy that knocked on my door the other day.

Now, depending on where you look they are either our environmental savior or a sadistic cash grab out to financially destroy the poor and huddled masses. The benefits for the power companies are obvious:

1. No need to send people around to every house to look at the meters
2. Near real time feedback on network demand allowing tighter control of supply
3. Ability to remotely connect and disconnect power to houses
4. New tariffs are much higher than existing power costs

However, the benefits to the consumer and the environment appear to be lacking. The potential benefits are obvious and focussed around real time feed back of energy use. Quite frankly it is hard to determine how much energy is being used in your house at any particular moment in time. Even after studying electrical engineering at uni I couldn't tell you if having my induction cook top on high uses more power than my air conditioner for example.

If the consumers are empowered by real time stats, if they can see the difference in energy usage that adjusting the thermostat by a degree can have then that is where the real benefit of smart meters will be had. That is basically that

Smart meters need smart stats

But the power companies actually lose out if they provide those stats to the customer, think about it for a minute. Not only are they forced to pay for the infrastructure costs required to collect and display the information but they also lose out because and informed and educated customer will use less electricity. It is counterintuitive for them to provide the information, it is obvious then that a third party provider needs to exist to collect and process this information.

I am yet to see any indications that such an arrangement will ever happen but I am sure that we'll get there in the end. However, I was greatly pleased and encouraged the other day when I found Smart Energy Groups in my daily twitter wanderings. It is a Melbourne based group that has just starting to sell the Seg Meter.

An internet enabled multi-channel energy meter that measures energy usage, and connects to the smartenergygroups.com website.

Basically it does everything that a smart meter should, allows the user to get instantaneous energy usage feedback on a range of devices computer, smart phone etc and even has channels so that you can set it up to tell you what individual energy circuits in your house are using.

The device is designed to be modded and improved by the users which will no doubt lead to some awesome customizations and additions from the hacking community. While it is too early for this device to be widely used by Joe Public it is a step in the right direction. And I am seriously considering how to to get one of these working in my home. If it wasn't for the possibility of a move shortly I probably would have already ordered it.

In the end, unless the power companies get an advantage from providing the information to the consumers there will be no incentive for them to do it, why would they when they get all their benefits upfront and such information will just harm there bottom line!