There are several comments from people who don't see the point of smart meters, or think that it's just about removing the need for meter readers.
There are two important things that can only be done via smart meters:
- Time-of-use tariffs, which are aligned to the cost of energy production. For example, Octopus Tracker (https://octopus.energy/smart/tracker/) has an energy price set daily based on the wholesale rate. This is (on average) cheaper for customers, and cheaper for the supplier (because they don't need to spend as much on hedging).
- Demand shifting, so customers can be paid or get discounts for reducing electricity usage when the load on the grid is high. The UK did this over last winter, and led to a peak energy reduction of 188MW (about 10% of the UK's coal power generation capacity). There's a report at https://octoenergy-production-media.s3.amazonaws.com/documen...
Both are ways of aligning the cost and environmental impact of energy with its price, and both become increasingly important as a higher percentage of energy is generated from variable renewable sources.
Interesting how "new and special" that seems in the UK with only daily prices? There are many providers offering hourly pricing in the Netherlands if you want to. I've seen some projects by enthusiasts to link those APIs to smart home systems and essentially use very cheap energy by timing their larger loads to the low-price moments. Especially on days with a lot of wind and solar energy.
Yeah, there are half-hourly pricing tariffs too, but I think that's a bit more niche - the added value is mostly if you have an electric car and your own solar panels.
You can also cut people off, or shunt them onto a pay-as-you-go tariff without installing another meter
It's also another point of failure.
I have a SMETS2 meter, and appreciate the time of day billing and better feed-in metering for my PV, but I'll not be at all surprised if this is hacked one day to cut millions of people off.
Always a danger with connected systems. I believe that smart meters have many different controls to stop this happening, including digital signatures for important updates and also break glass recovery mechanisms. Not saying it's impossible, but I'm not losing any sleep over it.
The big benefit is taxation: it allows for net-metering with the surplus sold at a low rate to be bought back at a much higher one. Obviously this was the plan all along...
You’ll find this happening with many things. Chrysler/dodge/Jeep vehicles built before 2016-2017 were using Sprint’s CDMA network for their telematics. When they shutdown the network it shutdown all cellular features in these vehicles. On the plus side, if you’re looking for a modern vehicle with no way to “phone home” take a look at those. ;)
That's good to know. I have been getting along fine by driving older cars, but obviously that won't last forever. I have always assumed that whenever the day comes that anything which still runs was built to phone home, I'd have to learn how to take the dash apart and remove the SIM or the antenna; but perhaps the endless grind of technological obsolescence will do the job for me. Wouldn't that be ironically nice?
In a lot of cars its the infotainment system. In my car there is an information system that runs in tandem with the stereo and feeds information to the dashboard. Pull that out and it cannot communicate to the manufacturer. However pull that out and your stereo no longer works. There are after market stereos but nothing that fits nicely in your dashboard AND has a usable UI (there exist tesla-style giant LCD screens but the software is what you would expect from an unlicensed chinese manufacturer)
Almost nobody with a 5+ year old car goes to a dealer though, so while Ford can download this, in practice they never will. One the care case someone does, the tool will download data, but Ford will no longer be maintaining the system it uploads to anymore.
If you need ford required service your nondealer has to pay for the ford system. That ford system that hooks to your ODB2 port calls back home and sends all the APIC data.
Have you ever gotten a new key made for your Ford? That’s one of those services which requires a ford system. It’s the same system ford has used for almost 20 years now. But you are correct, it will no longer be maintained for random reasons…
In a lot of cars, this will be an identical board (since the manufacturer only wants to certify one vs many of them). This gives you at least a start of what to look for.
If you do something to Part A, it doesn't void the warranty to Part B unless the manufacturer can prove it did.
If you unplug the cellular antenna, that should not affect the physical characteristics of the engine for example.
Companies can claim anything they want such as 'warranty void if you remove this sticker' (or not responsible for damage), but that does not automatically make it true. A Supreme Court opinion even said "warranty void if removed" stickers might even be illegal, but they would need a case to come to them before they can determine that.
It used AT&T 3G to communicate with Ford's MyFordMobile servers. Ford sunset MyFordMobile shortly after AT&T sunset 3G nationwide (US) two years ago. They had a service program which replaced the head units with more modern SYNC 4 ones that have 4G radios in them and work with Ford's FordPass service.
However, the dealer nearby us didn't know about the service and, because they didn't have the parts on hand, would have needed to hold that car for two weeks before doing any work.
So, just like that, we lost remote start (via app), location tracking and a bunch of actually useful features.
Just dealt with this in the US. And what did they replace it with? A "4G" meter. So, what, about 8 years worth of functionality before that tech is turned off and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated?
I'm dealing with this in a slightly different context right now - installing cellular remote access/VPN appliances in industrial manufacturing equipment. The equipment is required to have a lifespan of at least 10 years. Our adjacent equipment regularly lasts double that. Some of the equipment is built around castings and transformers that are 4-10x that age.
But they also want me to be able to dial into the equipment later, and won't give me WAN access. But no cellular vendor in their right mind will certify that the adjoining towers will have any particular frequency available for more than ~5 years, typically limiting it to a warranty of 3 years. This isn't the only pain point - what about the licensing server that the proprietary IDE for the PLC calls out to? The operating system on which said IDE is installed? Security protocols on the SCADA uplink? Replacement parts and critical spares? Good luck!
Unfortunately, a huge amount of industry is effectively subsidized by breakneck investment in consumer smartphones, automotive, and PC equipment. People don't care or don't understand that their choices on the showroom floor for the glossier, flashier, 'smarter' gear result in painful, expensive obsolescence just a couple years in the future. Manufacturers are only incentivized to sell new products and ignore old products, we need a massive shift in consumer preference if we want to avoid this.
Nobody cares about e-waste. If they did companies would stop producing new products at breakneck speed and consumers would stop buying them.
Instead they care about the optics, so you get the ocassional Apple video about how they replaced foo material with bar, while creating not servicable BS - oh, and things like paper straws.
Recycling is also mostly BS (things in the "recycle" bins just end in landfills abroad).
So this is just another drop in the huge ever increasing pile.
Nobody with money cares about e-waste. Those of us on a tight budget value our devices and lament the difficulty of repair.
My phone is 6 years old, and I'm hoping to be able to pay someone to replace the screen and battery at some point (knock on wood).
I specifically bought a gaming laptop to replace my hoity-toity Surface-with-the-dead-battery-base, thinking it would be easier to repair. Come charge port issues, I happily tear it down only to find that it's soldered in (my 2008 HP laptop did not have this problem).
Even when consumers are forced by circumstances to reduce, and make efforts to reuse, companies essentilly force recycle (which, as you said, is essentially "trash").
It’s sad but the best way to avoid e-waste on a personal level appears to be “buy the absolute most common of everything and take care of it”. Because those are the most likely to have parts or even whole working copies available.
And then you still run into “repairing this phone screen is $200, you can buy a used one on eBay for $100” issue.
I disagree. The difficulty of replacing tech changes one's relationship to one's devices. Things that I see people throw away as "e-waste" are really, "Things someone couldn't be assed to repair or repurpose." For example, broken TVs could be repurposed as large light panels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4), or their main boards could be hacked for fun and profit (https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from...). When I see a broken TV, even one I don't own, that's where the pain comes from. Same with phones, laptops, etc. We throw away so mny perfectly good general-purpose computers, it's insane. When we run out of a necessary resource for their manufacture, will we just be scavenging them?
Please direct your attention to any instance of the vast amount of media concerning the inability of people who grew up poor to shake not only their habits but how that background makes them feel about the world. One was up for several Academy Awards last year. The answer is an unequivocal, if not necessarily universal, yes.
But that's also immaterial. That a person's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors might change when they find themselves in a different socioeconomic context doesn't make those experiences any less meaningful - to themselves or society. If personal scarcity inspires more sustainable behavior amidst an environment of eventual, absolute planetary scarcity, which can be applied more widely, all the better.
> and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated
That's money generated while the e-waste is not factored in. I know I'm stating the obvious. But it's a problem with being realistic, as you start seeing idiosyncrasies everywhere: I run my household on 4g as I can reach realistic speeds of 100Mb/s. Theoretically that goes up to 150Mb/s. A 4k stream (compressed without visual loss) requires 15Mb/s. So 10 people in a household could simultaneously watch 4k content.
Did I fail at math? Why does anyone need 5g? What for?
Well, ironically, 5g is much better designed for such small devices to connect to the cell network: it can support lower-power devices and they take a lot less network resources. 5G is an infrastructure upgrade more than a consumer upgrade (consumer benefit is incidental: the network is less congested, especially in denser areas)
Basically it is so your smart TV can upload all your watch information without getting you to cough up your wifi password. Soon when you buy a toilet seat it will have a 5G modem in it and upload your bowel movement information to the cloud automatically. The possibilities are endless.
I run my household on 4G too. I live at the center of the town. My ”realistic” speeds with a CAT4 LTE router are 4-34mbps. My guess for this range, is that other people are using the network too, so I cannot get the max bandwidth all the time.
I also own a CAT6 LTE router (serving currently another house), which doubles the bandwidth, so around 8-68mpbs, quite better. With a 5G router I expect quadruple speeds, so around 32-270mbps.
Now we finally reach a usable area, where I can zoom or netflix anytime during the day. :)
I felt the same way during the 5G hype phase. There were all kinds of sales pitches about how it would enable new applications, but I never really got what more bandwidth was supposed to accomplish.
I'm not sure how modular they are, if they're just replacing a transmitter or something, I've seen some places transmitting only locally (zigbee or other) then a module on the street syncing upstream
But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings
RE "...ut let's say even $500 for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings ..." If a meter is read every 3 months, that is 32 reads in 8 years. That's about $15 a read In my street, it takes a meter reader about 2 minutes max to read , record a meter and walk to next meter. need to allow for overheads, so to me its unknown if it actually is cheaper or not to send a human ???
My gas company has monthly bills, but read the meter annually. They estimate usage other months, you send in any corrections if it's wrong, rnd at the end of the year they read the meter & reconcile any discrepancy.
> But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings
Probably true, but only as long as one can continue to externalize the cost of handling the resulting e-waste to future generations or at least current-day taxpayers.
"e-waste" is, unfortunately, mostly a term used to deflect from the real issues with all the garbage produced. Shipping and installing the meters likely generates more waste than producing the meters, themselves.
Right, but that's also the case for the cost of handling the resulting e-waste.
Maybe they meant "externalize" in the "externalities" sense—environmental damage, etc? If so that makes some sense, but for a full accounting you'd have to compare that to the externalities caused by all the people driving around to take readings (tailpipe emissions, adding to traffic, etc).
I think in reality it is a more efficient use of bandwidth using GSM. The alternative means your utility would have to maintain infrastructure and use up alternative bandwidth. In reality I think there should be regulation to keep some really basic form operating like 2G with GPRS or something on all networks.
Meters are already hardwired to each other. There's little reason to need it to be wireless to begin with.
But either way, it's common for them to also chirp at 915MHz. They don't need their own band to operate, they can participate in these same bands used by other devices. They're not sending that much data.
One could mandate a modular design so that the communication pcb could be replaced, i.e. less e-waste. I wonder if smart meter manufacturers stay in business long enough for it to matter.
You do. It’s hidden in that the power company picks up the initial tab, but don’t let that confuse you into thinking that money doesn’t eventually come out of your pocket.
Ha! Good joke. These days they just send out letters asking the customer to read the meter instead. First time I got one of those, I was thinking "What? No, that's your job. Don't I pay you for that?"
Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely. I report mine (via SMS) so I don't get a surprise bill (or find I've been giving them a six month interest-free loan) when the estimated use and the actual use differ.
> Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely.
Not here. I assume that as long as your consumption figures aren't wildly implausible, they just leave you alone. You can voluntarily upload a picture of your meter while submitting the reading, but I've never bothered and they've never requested it.
Probably there are random spot checks, but personally I've never been subjected to one of those. They might also catch you when the meter finally gets replaced at some point, but power meters seem to be relatively long-lived, so they probably won't rely on that alone.
It also really doesn't help that some of the power companies have started sending letters/emails to their customers saying "your meter has reached the end of its life, we have a legal obligation to replace it, please arrange an appointment to fit a smart meter". They're lying to try to force you to allow them to install a smart meter, and they're only doing that because so many people have said that they don't want one.
Most of the world reports their meters regularly to get accurate measures - the company still sends someone out every 6-12 months to true up. You're free to lie or ignore it, but the bill will come due just the same.
Many of them don’t even need to be directly read - they have a little sensor that can be read from nearby, sometimes even just by a utility truck driving by.
In France the electricity meter talks to the provider through the power line.
And my newly installed water meter reports water consumption through a custom radio module.
It sounds completely stupid to rely on 3G networks which are spotty or out of reach in many places. They’re probably more expensive too and take up some connections to the antenna.
My municipal water meter transmits readings in the clear on the 915 MHz band. There's a neat program to catch the readings: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
They could also check the physical meter for that, or if they are wardriving for the signal they could likely pick up the presence/lack of WiFi/5G/LTE signals which would probably be even more accurate than power usage.
1. You can sit in a car and read the meters for multiple houses at once, you actually need to trespass to read the physical meter
2. At home devices will still generate traffic, stuff like ring cameras, any laptops that are set to wakeup on network requests, ipads left behind, tons of smart devices. Water meter sounds like less of a hassle.
3. I don’t think most people use 5G or LTE at home, most would use wifi.
4. You could probably convince gullible people into buying a traffic spoofer device that acts as a residential vpn exit node by saying that criminals can detect when you’re on vacation by reading your wifi usage. Like those devices that will turn your TV on while you’re on vacation.
It's just a tradeoff. There are advantages to consolidating on the same infrastructure for many different use cases. There is a much larger critical mass of people working on cellular technologies than on the technologies necessary to communicate via power lines or custom radios.
But of course there are also disadvantages, and this is one of them.
There is always a balance between concentrating effort behind a single solution, and having that solution be a single point of failure.
Why would you refuse if you can get detailed information out of a smart meter about your usage? You can save a lot of power by knowing what is going on and if you have solar you definitely want a smart meter. You also don't need people coming by every so often to check how much electricity, water and gas you have used.
Here in Switzerland 80% of homes are supposed to have smart meters by 2027 but it looks like it will take longer, we are at 20%[1]. Once you have one the energy company has to give you access to (by law[2]) it (rs232, Ethernet what every the device offers) so you can read the data from it.
Do you want people to know when you're at home? Fairly easy to do from electricity or water usage patterns. Supposedly only the utility supplier would have that information, but they are so incompetent at security, who knows who else? Certainly the police have access to that. Looks like a sensible security measure to avoid that exposure.
You can also drive/walk past in the evening and see if the lights are on inside.
Snooping a smart meter signal wouldn’t give away much more, and would be much for effort for a typical burglar
I miss the point of those "advantages" - so what if I know how much water my guests used? Should I run over them in the bathroom and stop them from flushing? Should I let people only come in summer, and tell them to bring their own batteries? Should I stop having guests at all? All because the smart meter told me they pee at noon? And same for my usual electricity usage. I know what I have running and I know what I should shut down, I'm living in this house right. Not like some device sneaks on me and plugs itself in when I doze off. Ok, when I become a solar producer I will probably be helped by smarted devices, but until then I'm totally missing the point.
> [...] You can save a lot of power by knowing what is going on [...]
I'm really curious how you go from "smart meter" to "save a lot of power". Just because I have a smeter, I won't save money. My regular meter already shows power consumption (not that convenient, that's true) and my smart meter won't tell me what actually uses my power. So, regarding saving power, it's the same as with a regular meter?
> Why would you refuse if you can get detailed information out of a smart meter about your usage?
Why would you block ads when you can get "relevant" information on what to buy and consume?
The same asymmetric relationship exists here: the power company gets a lot more benefits from this system than you do, in fact it may even be at your detriment and no one cares.
Why? What does this matter to you? It's not like these people are going to lose their electrical service due to this.
It's a problem for the utilities, and a cost that will be borne by all their rate payers, but I don't see any individualized cost or benefit here that is dependent on having or not having one of these meters.
The newer generation smart meters operate on their own network, so that its critical and separate infrastructure so this won't happen again in the future. Also you have to be pretty set on not getting a smart meter as it removes you from a lot of competitive energy deals, especially ones with a cheaper night rate.
It’s nice of them to ask. Typically it’s theirs for running their side of the contract with you, and oftentimes they’ve got a right to come service it.
Is there a reason they're using cell networks to communicate instead of just communicating over the power lines? These devices are meant to be in place for decades, so even a custom solution seems like it would be worth it.
I worked on this, like 15 years ago, but ultimately after you go out of lab, there is so much garbage in the network that a lot of time this is not feasible.
Is there an existing mass-produced solution that can do it? The normal power line ethernet devices can handle ~300m and degrade quickly with noise. You'd need something much more specialised to go low speed high distance and able to handle lots of unsynchronized devices on the same line.
More common solutions installed in other places are dedicated mesh networks like Gridstream or AcuMesh. I'm really not sure why would the energy companies go for GSM instead. This is not just for the cities - Gridstream can reach a few km away.
Edit: apparently the powerline based data exists in the wild. (Keyword: PLC, but it's only one-way) Here's an interesting report from an Australian provider https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/1494afbe... 10 years ago they were 46% rf mesh, 39% powerline data, 0.1% GSM. It's hard to find something more recent, but local mobile telcos had a lot of announcements / ads in later years, so the trend may have moved as well...
You've gotten some answers below, but one answer is: There are several common ways of handling this, from powerline communication to cellular to LPWAN approaches, and all of them are in use, with different trade-offs. There's no one standard for smart metering infrastructure. Older AMR approaches often would just broadcast a signal that you could pick up with a vehicle driving around the neighborhood, but they're one way only. AMI uses cell, PLC, LPWAN, and sometimes zigbee (to a neighborhood gateway). What your meter uses depends on your power company and when it was installed.
That definitely exists, but AFAIK it requires special equipment to get the signal across transformers. Not much of a problem in urban environments, but e.g. in low-density areas in the US, where every house has its own transformer, it might be a problem.
signalling/communicating through the zero cross of the AC is trivial as long as there is a galvanic connection (wire). Once you get to transformers nothing much happens unless their is a module on the secondary to intercept it and then use other channels to ferry the data. In other words each transformer would need to have a communication device/router - I suppose that's way more expensive than ad-hoc modules per meter.
Exactly if it’s not broadcast, periodically the old manual system kicks in and the financial incentives to encourage use makes sense.
And network security is another important aspect that can be a challenge but ultimately a benefit if better network security is needed and implemented standard with a clan for iot
If it were done intelligently (hint: it won't be) they'd be IoT devices designed to ONLY transmit outwards in some encoded method, so that the only risk patterns are leaking data and failing to send data.
Of course, in a intelligent world, the local power utility would be just that, local, and only involved in the last-mile connections of power and fiber, and let who actually sends down those be handled at the central "hubs".
Then since data and power were handled by the same company, your electric meter would just have a connection to your fiber router.
Oh heck no. I have enough concerns about the security of those devices, I certainly don't want them hanging off the side of everyone's home network. I have enough expertise to put them on a separate network isolated from anything I care about, but the average punter doesn't.
Do home appliances and devices communicate with the power company via the smart meters? When I first heard about the smart meter there were fears that it would allow the power company to see which appliances you were using, and charge you a different rate. For instance, an electric vehicle.
No, the smart meters generally don't have this functionality. Other appliances can in theory hook into the market information from the supplier, but this isn't very common, and is generally under the user's control. The most common thing where users cede some control is home battery systems, where some providers give a discount or outright pay the users for control over using the batteries as grid storage ("virtual power plant"). But this is independent of the smart meter, a smart meter is mostly useful as someone with a home battery or EV because you can get acess to minute-by-minute energy pricing, whuch will generally save you money if you can shift your draw from the grid to when it's cheap.
(I will say for the average consumer at the moment a smart meter only gives you a mild convenience increase, and is likely not worth the trouble. I haven't got one installed myself, despite and now in part because my energy provider has been hounding me to install one, due to this push from the government. There's no reason to be an early adopter for this if the benefits aren't good, given how badly scuffed the first iteration was)
You want that if done with respect to privacy. Your electric car should not charge when rates are high. Your water heater should only turn on when the wind is blowing and there is a surplus of cheap power. (This requires extra hot water storage to make it through a day)
It needs to be two way as the power company is better able to coordinate the limited surplus with everyone else. I don't care if my water is heated at 10pm, midnight or 2am, I just want warm water for my shower when i get up.
That still doesn't require bidirectional communication. The power company can assume that a collection of a reasonable number of households will have a fairly predictable power draw when presented with information from the power company, and this should allow the power company to balance the surplus without receiving data back from the households.
There're two issues here. The first is coordination - a lot of people might say that all they want the power company to tell them is the spot price and then let them make their own decisions on when to use power, and that anything more (such as instructions to different households to do their heating at a certain time) takes away their autonomy/sovereignty. That could be something that we just accept as a price to pay for a stable power grid, but it's more than we have now and I can see possible pushback against it. The second issue is price fairness - in the absence of another coordination method, a power company could manage demand by giving a lower price to groups of households to trigger the demand in a subset of the grid, so not everyone gets the same price at the same time. But they would have to do that in a fair way, for instance by time-sharing that lower price around.
I consult in the industry, and certainly don't know everything, but everything that I've seen says that no, they don't. There are companies out there like Bidgely who claim they can do that to some extent, but they likely can only do that for really big loads unless your meters only powers a very few things.
They offer things like discounted rates for charging electric vehicles. And are talking about being able to tell people when they're using more power than usual that they forgot to turn the oven off or they're using their dishwasher during peak or whatever.
In the UK the meters connect directly to 2G/3G wireless networks? That would be stupid expensive to do here in the US (I know, we looked at it). In the US the meters connect to a proprietary spread spectrum network the utility sets up and maintains. The meters are capable of communicating with one another and dynamically update their routing table in order to get the message to a take-out point. Once at the take-out point a fiber connection takes it to the head-end system where the utility can communicate with it.
I'm surprised they're not keeping 2G GSM/GPRS for legacy applications. E.g. considering the life time of cars, for an eCall-like[1] solution having a network that'll be available for a few decades would make sense; or user-replacable modules.
For smart meters I had to prepare a network cable into our new main fuse box; but IIUC we won't be getting one of these, for now it's just a requirement.
Indeed, passing data from the secondary to the primary of the transformers is actually hard, adding the handling of voltage transient spikes would make it even more expensive. And you need only a handful of bytes per hour (assuming nice reporting per each hour) - real data is likely fewer than 16bytes (id-time-value), adding an iv and block size encryption is all it takes.
There are powerline carrier (PLC) systems that can communicate over the distribution system at about 1-2 baud. They’re getting replaced by mesh RF systems since PLC is quite lossy and the bandwidth is not sufficient for pulling back full timeseries data for planning studies. I’ve heard PLC systems outside the US work quite a bit better since 230V distribution has fewer distribution transformers.
The US systems are 120 V line-to-neutral (ground), whereas the European and lots of other countries are 230 V line-to-neutral. So after going through a distribution transformer, the non-US systems are at a higher voltage, which means you can distribute the power further without large losses. This leads to more neighborhood-level transformers serving dozens of consumers instead of the US practice of using split-phase transformers to serve only 2 consumers at a time.
PLC-enabled smart meters ("Linky") are the norm in France. I am pretty sure I also heard multiple times that PLC was used to transmit some data to equipment along high-voltage lines.
Yeah, I think PLC is awesome, but it's also just a whole parallel technology stack that has to be maintained and supplied. This is not such a heavy burden because it's mature technology, but it's not nothing. And while cellular and RF technologies in general are useful for many things, PLC is really only useful for this one kind of (lossy, high-latency, low-bandwidth) communication about electrical networks.
Yes, it would be great if there were reliable publicly accessible RF networks available. I work mostly with rural US utilities and the problems they see with cell networks are (1) coverage isn't great and (2) costs aren't competitive with PLC or even utility-owned RF mesh.
Yeah that makes sense. But my general point is that it often makes some sense to invest in a technology that is in the process of being deployed more widely, rather than a technology that is naturally limited in reach. Cell (and satellite) coverage is likely to broaden and move down the cost curve, PLC won't ever be used for anything besides this, and likely isn't going to see much innovation because of that relatively small target market.
A sibling comment makes the more relevant point about powerline, but it’s worth considering that whatever the power company has to pay, you the consumer will be paying for in the end.
You could make the case (a good one I think) that a homeowner providing connectivity should get a discount to their bill, or that the power company could directly charge for a separate communication channel.
That’s kinda saying the same thing in different ways and depending on your point of view they might not feel fair perhaps. But the consumer is paying either way.
Edit: “separate communication channel” could include a human meter reader too!
I was talking about the power cables. But wifi would do the trick too, but as you say why should the homeowner subsidize. It is not so much the cost (maybe 1c of connection) but the onus to keep it up at all times and the security concern of letting IoT you can't patch yourself on your network.
The comms module is normally separate from , but attached to, the electricity meter. Not user replaceable though.
Slightly surprised (act, not really) that this is happening. Seems to have been dodged in Scotland & the North because cellular coverage there was poor enough they went with a 400mhz network instead.
Those meters aren't exactly cheap, if they need replacement it may well be a net-negative both for the environment and for the company that owns them. Meter readers would visit once every year and for something like a couple of minutes per address, and in many places the meters are outside of the buildings and can be read from the common spaces.
They acquired a company called CellBounce (https://cellbounce.com/) that manufactures a very small 3G-LTE gateway. They bind it to a single device (eg, locking it to an alarm panel's IMSI) and pass the authentication through to AT&T to allow the panel onto the LTE network. Most of the device itself is just a giant lead acid battery, and the actual CellBounce motherboard is... actually very low component count and tiny.
The actual Qualcomm femtocell board (linked below) that they built as a reference design for the chipset is... amazingly tiny.
There are two important things that can only be done via smart meters:
- Time-of-use tariffs, which are aligned to the cost of energy production. For example, Octopus Tracker (https://octopus.energy/smart/tracker/) has an energy price set daily based on the wholesale rate. This is (on average) cheaper for customers, and cheaper for the supplier (because they don't need to spend as much on hedging).
- Demand shifting, so customers can be paid or get discounts for reducing electricity usage when the load on the grid is high. The UK did this over last winter, and led to a peak energy reduction of 188MW (about 10% of the UK's coal power generation capacity). There's a report at https://octoenergy-production-media.s3.amazonaws.com/documen...
Both are ways of aligning the cost and environmental impact of energy with its price, and both become increasingly important as a higher percentage of energy is generated from variable renewable sources.