The smart meters scandal is about to explode in our faces
By Paul Homewood
The technology doesn’t work as planned. The numbers don’t add up. And ordinary people may have their lives ruined by a system that barely even recognises they exist. If ITV is looking for a follow-up to it’s hit drama about the Post Office scandal its producers and script writers do not have to look very far. It is playing out in real-time right now. In reality, the smart meter fiasco risks turning into the next Horizon scandal.
Like so many government-backed technologies, it was sold as a way of making the system more efficient, with the added benefit of helping us hit our net zero targets. Smart meters installed in our homes would give us more accurate readings of how much electricity we were using, while the little monitors in the corner might gently nudge us towards consuming a little less (which would be helpful, given that the Government has woefully failed to make sure we have enough power to keep the lights switched on).
What’s not to like about that?
Well, quite a lot as it turns out. According to the latest figures from the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero, of the 30 million meters installed in British homes, almost four million are not working properly. The estimate was 2.7 million in June last year, but has now been revised dramatically upwards.
The results of that can often be painful. Households may well have been overcharged for the energy use, and at a time when many are already struggling to pay their energy bills. Some households might now have to go back to manual readings if they want to question their bill, but the technology can make that difficult, too.
There is a depressingly familiar pattern starting to emerge. The computer system doesn’t work as it should. There is plenty of buck passing, with people initially denying there is anything to worry about, then blaming someone else for the problems, and finally denying that anything can ever be done to fix the problem. It seems that no one has learned anything from the Post Office scandal. Instead, ministers will grimly press ahead with a technology that clearly doesn’t work, and if people are forced to pay an inflated sum, then it will simply be brushed under the carpet.
Even more terrifyingly, the meters may eventually be used for “time-of-day” charging. It would not be much of a surprise if Ed Miliband, as energy minister in a government led by Sir Keir Starmer, introduces some form of energy rationing. After all, there seems to be little hope of ever hitting our net zero targets without it. Your smart meter might then decide when you can and can’t boil the kettle, regardless of whether it works properly – and if it doesn’t work well enough, that’s tough.
There are two clear lessons from this latest catastrophe. Firstly, the Government should stop relying on computer “revolutions”. We have plenty of evidence that Whitehall almost always gets IT wrong. And secondly, it should stop trying to micromanage every household. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with “smart meters” any more than there is with smart phones, or smart speakers, or smart TVs, or any other device where the addition of a couple of microchips upgrades performance.
But it should leave it to the market to decide. If the product is genuinely better, people will be perfectly happy to buy it, and if it is rubbish they will probably decline.
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Of course it never was about “efficiency”. Yes, twenty years ago a smart meter would have done away with the cost of sending out a meter reader and the problem of estimated bills. But then the internet came along, people were able to submit their own readings every month and computers could then raise bills automatically. All much better and efficient than the monolithic rollout of smart meters.
No, from the start it was all about rationing energy, whether through price or switching off supply.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It’s all looking good for EVs then because who will rely on domestic supply to charge them up?The honeymoon is over.
I don’t think it was initially about rationing but rather yet another example of planning failing dismally. And yet another example of assuming millions of people will make very small savings, requiring a far bit of effort, to produce aggregate numbers big enough to justify top-down impositions. And that’s the issue – top-down planning that requires absolute bottom-up behaviours.
Hey Matthew, DESNEZ have issued the quarterly update on smart meters, can you hack up a quick scary sounding click bait story? On it boss.
Net Zero is law and the current plan is to rely primarily on intermittent supply, so it makes sense to have a mechanism to manage demand.
Smart meters support time of day pricing allowing rates to be lower when there is surplus and higher when there is shortage.
Some energy companies have been running sessions where electricity is free for up to 4 hours, and saving sessions where consumers are paid for using less electricity than they usually use.
Smart meters that are not operating in smart mode are just meters and can be read manually just like in days of yore. Over 30 million meters are operating in smart mode and at the current rate of installation all meters will be smart within 10 years.
Smart meters are not necessary for the power to be switched off, remember the 3 day week.
And what’s the price when there’s neither supply nor storage? And what’s the price when we have both? Are you an idiot or do you get paid to spout idiocy?
I’m not advocating it old boy just explaining the current policy and how it is being implemented.
There seems still to be little to no comprehension amongst the zealots of just how much storage is required. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, there is a general acceptance of the inevitability that the lights will go out periodically if we are unable to get emergency power from France.
My bête noire is Edward “brain dead” Davey who was so proud of his part in scuppering our Nuclear Power Station development.
Net Zero is a law that could and should be recinded. Until then the populace should fight against the Net Zero insanity with all their might.
This is the point.
Moaning about aspects of the Net Zero implementation is a waste of time, everything flows from the statute.
E.ON Next demanded that I have a Smart Meter – they insisted that they WANTED me to save both Monet and Energy – after many emails where I pointed out that these SM’s were just to allow Demand / Dynamic Pricing, which they strongly denied and advised that maybe I was not qualified to comment, in the end we agreed to disagree and they stopped emailing, texting and harassing me regarding the modern wonder of SM’s.
We all knew at the start it had nothing to do with ease of use, it was to allow prices to be amended frequently and fast – no good putting the price up if the meter does not allow instant updating.
At this moment Miliband will be wetting himself with excitement over the prospect of being in ultimate change of the biggest scam in history- at the push of a button he can control what almost 65million people do- can they afford to eat, heat, watch tv, charge their mobiles, cars, tablets, laptops, work from home, office, factories, shops, do the shopping- more power in one finger than a dozen nuclear bombs- life or death, he will be thinking “ it’s mine, all mine, they will all pay, and pay and pay again”.
When this disaster, insufficient energy v demand hits, we will really see just how incredible incompetent and corrupt our politicians have been in the last twenty five years, but their defence will be that they were saving the planet and we must accept a bit of pain for the greater good.
We hear of people receiving absurdly high bills from their smart meter, but has anyone ever received a refund because of an erroneous reading? Strange how the meters seem to favour the generating company with wrong readings.
A bit like the Horizon system.
I would be very interested in any ACCURATE figures on how many ELECTRICITY Smart meters there are in the UK and what percentage of these are domestic. Simply saying “smart meters” is not enough, e.g. I have an electricity smart meter but a conventional gas meter. The best figure I have come across is that only 57% of homes have an electricity smart meter which would be about 18 million. Anybody got any definitive figures by type of meter? (And yes I have tried but most of my findings are ambiguous)
Q4 2023 Smart Meters Statistics Report (publishing.service.gov.uk)
Thanks for the link, AJ 👍
It’ll take time to read & assimilate.
Those details (figure 3) show domestic fully functioning electricity smart meters at 17.2 million i.e. in line with my estimate. The issue is electricity supply (nobody is suggesting using smart meters to control gas consumption…yet) so way, way short of universal coverage. With in the region of 30 million UK homes, many of the original meters about to fail or already have and many homes unable to have smart meters (restricted areas) then this “project” is going staggeringly badly after 13 years.
Write-up here
https://www.current-news.co.uk/uk-government-drop-smart-meter-installations-2023/
Gas supply is essentially off/on. There’s no timing differential in supply and it can be stored by just not producing it. Or turning it in to LNG. Or in Rough….
The main requirement is for a reasonable weather forecast. Pipeline pressures and flow take time to adjust. 2-3 days notice are needed to bolster supply into St Fergus from offshore. Probably at least a day’s notice to increase sendout from LNG regas to pressurise the network with more linepack across Southern England.
The Smart Meter fiasco is all due to poor design and project management by OfGen. They wrote the specs and features. – Like not thinking that consumers would change supplier. – Not supported in V1. Using 3G sim cards, knowing the 3G would be truned off in the near future.
We need to close OfGen and start again with some brains.
Our Vi electricity meter failed to communicate. Took 7 months for a replacement from Octopus.
I am sorry to be blunt but both the article and many of the comments are sheer nonsense. The whole program to introduce smart meters, not only in the UK but in many other countries, long predated the idea of dynamic pricing, NetZero, etc. It was driven by one simple consideration – the cost of sending out staff to collect meter readings. In many countries smart meters were designed to combine the functions of peak and off-peak meters which have been available in the UK since the 1970s. For example Italian smart meters collect data for 3 standard periods – peak, standard, off-peak. Everyone is able to choose between fixed and multiperiod tariffs.
The issue in the UK is a typically British one – over-engineering combined with utter incompetence in implementation. The Italian program was implemented in a fraction of the time and of the cost in the UK. The meters don’t rely on wireless connections that don’t work, they are simple to use, and everyone has them without fuss or conspiracy theories.
There have been variants of smart meters for electricity, gas & water for decades. They were installed in my house in Washington DC in the 1990s and they were used to manage air conditioning during periods of peak demand – with tariffs that offered significant savings.
People shouldn’t allow the stupidity and incompetence of the UK government to blind them to the reasons why smart meters have been adopted in many countries around the world. All meters have to be replaced intermittently. It is perfectly sensible to upgrade the technology to offer new options when this is done. Lynn is correct to point out that the internet has eased the task of meter reading but does anyone want to persist with the old style of meters with multiple dials? And why not have the option of peak/off-peak tariffs if they make sense for you?
A small correction. It was Paul rather than Matthew Lynn who referred to using the internet to collect meter readings. But we must remember that the origins of the smart meter program go back to about 2005, when the internet was neither widely available or easy to use. The problem with the idea of voluntary replacement of meters is that you only get the benefits of lower costs when all or almost all meters have been replaced. The Italian program of replacement that I refer to was universal and carried out by the distribution network operators (primarily Enel).
Gordon, UK traditional electricity meters (prior to Smart meters) did not have the means of remote disconnection. There is no need for a measuring device i.e. a meter to have specific remotely accessed control functions. …but Smart meters, right from the start ,were equipped with remote disconnection.
I have no idea whether other countries remote meter reading facilities have such a disconnect function but I know ours do. Why the need for such controls (there are others) is a relevant question not a conspiracy theory.
The Government’s impact assessment indicates that there is a strong business
case for taking the programme forward. This predicts benefits across the domestic
and smaller non-domestic sectors of £18.6 billion over the next twenty years,
implying a net benefit of £7.3 billion. These benefits derive in large part from
reductions in energy consumption and cost savings in industry processes. The costs
and subsequent benefits are expected to come through customers’ energy bills.
They did talk about safeguards against remote switching to prepayment mode and remote disconnection - we know how that went. This from their 2010 consultation on smart meter rollout. The projected savings estimates were a fraud.
Correct. Its a nonsense this notion that smart meters will result in businesses reducing consumption. A smart meter tells me the consumption of the whole building / plant, just like the old meter does. We save elec use now (as forever) by switching off lights and devices. With particular usage devices we have inlin meters to monitor elec use of certain machines or areas. A smart meter will tell me nothing I dont already know and wont make any difference to the energy saving practices weve used for decades.
Its an insult to suggest that without smarty meters people arn’t smart enough to monitor and conserve energy (money!).
bobn; Exactly! As you no doubt know, it’s the same story for domestic users: smart meters are useless for anything other than monitoring overall consumption. Far better to buy a £10 widget from Amazon which lets you check the consumption of individual appliances to identify any potential savings.
Maybe we ought to include the cost of these Smart Meters, and wonder how many years it will take a user who previously has not bothered to check their usage, to recover the cost. The initial budget was £12 Billion, which increased to £13 Billion, that is on average £450 per each of the 27 million households in the UK, recoverable from General taxation, Green Levies etc etc? Then add the cost of replacing/repairing faulty meters, and also the incredible waste of allowing the individual Energy Suppliers, of whom there are many, to fit the meters rather than one central Agency with a dedicated team.
Looking at the figures, Frank, the rollout has got to barely half the existing total meters out there and those it has are largely the “low hanging fruit”. The remaining nearly 50% yet to do are likely to be much harder for numerous reasons in addition to customer “reluctance”.
This rather begs the question who is getting royally shafted by all this? £450 per household so far seems staggeringly expensive for a mass project. How much does a smart meter actually cost when you buy them by the millions? Not a lot I would suggest. How long do they take to fit by a relatively lowly qualified fitter? Again it should not be expensive. I am confident that if I had to pay for the conversion directly myself in an open market I would pay a lot less than £450.
Equate this conversion to that of switching from “town gas” to natural gas which was a hugely more complex logistical operation.. That was fully completed in less time than this smart meter rollout has taken so far and the consumers did not have to pay for it.
Ray. Thanks for your comment. We all seem to mostly agree on this Forum, but how do we make the Politicians accountable or force them to explain themselves to the Electorate? I received a mainly nonsense reply from Claire Coutinho when I questioned the £20 Billion for Carbon Capture and Storage. The people forcing all these costs and changes in our way of life upon us, without consultation or agreement, will never be held to account. Maybe it really is too late.
frankobaysio: Is Claire Coutinho your MP? If not, how do you write to her, as I am only able to write to my own MP.
As far as carbon capture is concerned, to me it is ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’
I managed to get a reply from, and signed by Claire Coutinho, by writing to my MP, and asking him to forward my concerns directly to her, which he did. The reply from Coutinho came back via my MP, who immediately forwarded it to me. My question was directed to him. That is seemingly the protocol, and has worked before. I previously questioned the safety of EV’s for example, after Grant Shapps, then Sec of State for Transport, admitted in the House of Commons he had no idea that EV’s had a serious Fire Risk.
Incidentally I have just had new smoke alarms fitted by the Fire Brigade, who arrived directly from a car crash still with adrenalin running high.
I asked the Officers about EV battery fires and how they dealt with them. When the inextinguishable chemical fire has died down, and after much cooling with vast amounts of water, they transport the vehicle to a shipping container …..full of water…… and drop the car in …… for a week …..! Only then is there a reasonable chance it won’t reignite.
frankobaysio
Thank you.
They’re only smart relative to the people who get them.
And no mention of the cost of deployment to the consumer
It’s a fiasco because it’s a waste of money. People want to use electricity when they want to use it, not adjust their lives around when it might be cheaper. And if we did all switch according to price, the price would very rapidly adjust. And the more renewables we have, the greater the fixed element of total system cost is. We have to pay the total costs, no matter what.
You are generally correct, though I can see people using (or choosing not to use) a simple ToD tariff change. I.e., one rate from say 0600 to 1900, and the other from 1900 to 0600. I believe many would decide to do some things later. Charge their EV, for example.
But that’s about it. Anything more complicated will be ignored. As you say, people don’t want to be bothered.
We already have this with dual meter economy7. I dont have smarty meter but do have dual tariffs. The dishwasher and washing machine etc only get run after midnight.
What benefit will smarty meter give me?
Right, bobn. The meter isn’t for you, it’s for them.
Octopus give electricity away rather than switching off the generation, makes more sense than curtailment.
Octopus Power-ups | Free green electricity in East England | Octopus Energy
I think you need to go on a course covering Marketing.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
You’re welcome. How long have you been working for Octopus?
Does Octupussy have a secret excess generation capacity they are not telling us about?
The CEO’s personal assistant Pussy Galore loves renewables and is particularly fond of a large unit that she calls her East Anglia One.
Agreed. There is also a problem with local distribution capacity that I emphasised the other day. The local distribution network was originally constructed on the basis of random consumer use levels being averaged out. The system cannot accommodate mass simultaneous high power demand. Over 80% of consumers lines can only allow for around 2kW total simultaneous load. Up to 200 consumers may be connected to one circuit that maxes out at 300kW at the sub station.
Such immediate time of day use, if widely adopted , could actually promote catastrophic overload. However, as you say, it will not simply because the massive majority could not be arsed to modify their lifestyle. It would ultimately only be very minor financial benefit anyway.
Indeed, as long as the latest soap opera can be accessed no one thinks about anything else now ( except us lot of course).
I have never had a problem supplying accurate meter readings but then my last house had and my current house has readily accessible meters that are easy to read – or photograph with my phone. Therefore I have no need of a ‘smart’ meter.
likewise here in darkest kent.
Daily readings noted in the diary will keep those thieving b’stards in check.
And yet we are assured that “they” can fit 650,000 heat pumps – an almost infinitely more complex procedure than swapping a couple of meters – per year…
A scenario is that the ability to remotely disconnect individual smart meters reduces the risk of total grid collapse when demand exceeds electrical supply.
Meters showing a net energy input into the grid e.g. from a connected BEV, could be permitted to remain connected to the grid. Meters showing a net energy demand on the grid could be disconnected.
Do all smart meters in the UK offer the “remote disconnect” feature ?
As far as I am aware, all Smart meters have the remote disconnection ability. Your scenario is quite scary though as it would seem quite possible. Mercifully I have a back up generator as I live in a rural area prone to power cuts but for others…..oh dear.
I don’t see how cutting power with smart (sic) meters at the individual end-user level is an advantage over cutting it at a higher level, like a substation.
Individual disconnection allows removal of high users whilst retaining those exporting into the supply such as from batteries, combined heat and power units, solar, wind turbines etc.
On the 9th August 2019 large parts of the UK experienced a sudden loss of generation following a lightning strike with inadequate short circuit level due to wind and solar supplying such an unusually high combined output. The grid controllers started load shedding at sub station level to balance load to supply but this actually worsened the situation. In disconnecting some areas this also disconnected the generators connected at low voltage and resulted in even greater losses of supply. Large parts of London and eastern England were cut off leaving some people stranded in underground electrically powered trains. A nationwide outage was only avoided by Dinorwig and other PSH units.
n.b. the UK no longer has separate “Traction” supply for trains – if the grid goes down the trains stop! Crazy.
Not doubting you, Ray, but it seems a bit contrived.
And it is an environment in which those to lose power can be individually selected, for whatever reasons the selector has.
I stand for egalitarianism for power outages.
I don’t see how cutting power with smart (sic) meters at the individual end-user level is an advantage over cutting it at a higher level, like a substation.
Complete collapse of the grid at a “substation level” could be avoided if individual domestic demand is disconnected but individual domestic generation (e.g. connected BEVs) remains connected. On a larger geographical scale, this could avoid the need to disconnect a power station from the grid and possible subsequent “black start” issues.
In reality, total UK grid collapse on a national basis is (probably) a remote possibility, but the creation of islands of power station generation is a possibility, where a thermal power station is the centre of an island of electricity supply, surrounded by a sea of darkness.
To my knowledge, there are at least two pubs in the UK that are reputed to have a relatively secure power supply from a local thermal power station.
Individuals generating a pittance of electricity which is NOT hertz regulated. Doesn’t ring true that it could be helpful.
One idea could be that if say they cut 1 home in 5 you could at least try going round to neighbours to watch TV rather than blacking out whole neighbourhoods. I recall in our street one phase went out, blacking out roughly one house in 3. They had to dig up and replace the cable, so it was not a super fast fix. Neighbours did help out – but not everywhere would be so accomodating.
Individuals generating a pittance of electricity which is NOT hertz regulated.
It already happens in the UK with “vehicle to grid” (V2G) , although this is for a grid with “dedicated” generation attached. My limited undestanding is that this is currently at a trial stage, although I can’t see a technical reason why the energy from a BEV battery cannot be treated in the same way as the energy from solar panels i.e. use an inverter to convert from DC to AC, although scale might be an issue.
One BEV can certainly power one house (excluding lots of electric heating), it’s therefore possible that one BEV can power several houses during a power cut i.e. when no “dedicated” generation is connected, although my GUESS is that there is probably an automated disconnect fitted to the BEV charging circuit to prevent BEV electricity being transmitted to the local supply network unless “dedicated” generation is also attached to the same local supply network.
Micky R: That’s my understanding too.
V2G is a deceptively simple concept. As so often, there’s devilry lurking in the detail. The idea is that the cars’ onboard chargers are bi-directional so they can take 400/800V DC from the battery, convert it to 240V AC and push it back into the domestic “charger” (actually just a high-powered 240V connection). However, afaik, there are only 2 cars available in the UK with V2G capability – the Cupra Born and Nissan Leaf (maybe not all models of each) and the Leaf is being withdrawn from the market. So effectively none of the 1 million plus EVs already on the UK roads can supply the grid*.
Secondly, none of the domestic chargers already installed have the necessary safety kit to allow supply to the grid, as you mentioned.
So V2G is a pipedream until a) all existing chargers are replaced or upgraded plus all future installations being equipped for grid supply and b) new EVs start to be supplied with V2G built in. Ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.
*Quite a few EVs already have V2L (vehicle-to-load) via one or more 240V AC sockets – useful for powering tools, kettles etc outside the home. I fear that, sooner or later, someone will try to run their house wifi/freezer/TV/ whatever via an extension lead without isolating the house from the mains.
So V2G is a pipedream
As per my previous post, V2G is currently being trialled in the UK by Octopus.
I assume that there is some legislation that prevents someone connecting a BEV direct to the UK grid to allow energy to flow from the BEV to the grid. Other posters will have greater knowledge.
BEV <-> non-BEV battery <-> grid may be a possibility that complies to UK legislation. Reading around, I can see that there are various different feed-in tariffs (FITs). There’s even a FIT for “micro CHP”- I’d like my own power station please! Although “new build” micro CHP appears to be capped at 50kW and probably be “renewable” to be eligible for a FIT.