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A big push for small electricity meters
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TEXT OF STORY
Bob Moon: Some of America's biggest companies, including Google, General Electric and AT&T, have written President Obama a letter today. They want him to help install smart electricity meters in every home and business in the country to save billions and cut greenhouse gas emissions. From the Marketplace Sustainability Desk, Brett Neely has more.
Brett Neely: The problem is we know more about how much gas goes into a car than power goes into a house, says Michael Terrell, who works for Google:
Michael Terrell: People drive miles to save pennies on gas. We should have the ability to do that in our homes.
Smart meters can show you which of your appliances suck the most power. But the meters are expensive. Companies like Google and Whirlpool think the technology will mean big business.
Amy Davidsen works with Google through the nonprofit Climate Group:
Amy Davidsen: You know, you go to your office and you're able to log in on your computer or look on your telephone, and you can see, eventually, that there might be an appliance on that you forgot to turn off.
Google has that service right now. The stimulus bill gave states and utilities billions for smart meters. But the meters are still in short supply, says Ed Legge of the Edison Electric Institute:
Ed Legge: Everybody didn't go one day having landline phones and the next day having cell phones. It takes time.
Amy Davidsen says if the country gets serious about smart metering, Americans could slash their energy use by 15 percent within a decade.
I'm Brett Neely for Marketplace.
Tacoma Power has a free smart meter for outside plus a small box that is plugged into a outlet inside the house. It shows me daily, weekly, and monthly power usage plus how much money I have left on my account. It does not show me how much each appliance uses (although there are devices one can buy that do) but since it shows me how much power I used yesterday, I know which appliances I used that day (electic fireplace, dryer, kitchen stove, etc). I enjoy knowing how much I spend daily as it encourages me to be more careful. I hang my clothes outside to dry sometimes just to see the difference on my account.
Once more people have a smart meter, the marketplace will be develop more things to do with it.
Alabama Power put a smart meter on my electric service a few months ago. Can I even get a week to week or day to day or hour to hour usage report, NO. GE, I could watch my AC and decide well, 74 isn't so bad, what about 73 or 75? Or hum, when I run the drier it cost $2 to on one setting and $5 on the other. Maybe I should change. Why doesn't Alabama Power give me access to that information? Do I think they spent all that money to read my meter just once each month?
Your reporters need to look more closely into the claims made for smart meter. My latest electric bill was $12.73 for 29 kilowatt-hours. That is 42.6 cents per kilowatt-hour! The problem is the fixed-cost items on the bill. Because state utility commissioners don't believe in capitalism, they think it would be unfair if the company made a profit per kilowatt-hour. Instead, energy must be sold for the fuel cost plus a fixed-price markup per customer to cover company overhead and profit. Now add to that a fixed monthly charge for a smart meter. The result is, the less power you use, the more it costs you per unit. Obviously, using only 29 kW-hr in a month, I don't need "help" to lower my electrical usage. The smart meter does nothing but RAISE the cost of my power. The smart meter also WILL NOT do any of the things that are claimed for it. Your report, for instance, claims that the meter will show how much power each appliance uses. It doesn't and can't possibly do this unless houses are rewired so that each appliance is on a separate circuit and then each meter is equipped to monitor the many circuits. Smart meters don't do that. Here are some other things smart meter don't do. Located outside, it is no easier to check your consumption than going out and looking at the meter you have now. The meter records power usage in 15-minute increments and transmits it to the utility and they allow you to see your usage on a web site - but the web site will always display data from two days earlier! Now the utility says the meters were never intended to show real-time usage, although they made that very claim. They say it takes 11 hours to transmit the data (?), then time to process it and put it on the web site, so you will NEVER see your present rate of power usage. There are claims that the meter will allow you to take advantage of time-of-day-dependent pricing, but our utility doesn't have such pricing for residential customers, nor can the meter control your appliances turning them on when power is cheap, as claimed. The smart meters were supposed to allow the utility to turn off your appliances when that is beneficial to them (and this is touted as a benefit to the customer). Today's meters cannot do this, and, additionally, there are no appliances with input terminals so they can receive signals from a future smart meter that would turn the air conditioner, etc., on or off. The government's cash-for-clunker-appliances program is presently encouraging the purchase of new appliances that are not made to be controlled by a smart meter! Now the accuracy of the smart meters is in question as customers report that their bills suddenly jumped when the new meter was installed. The state of Texas is paying for tests to see if the meters are overcharging customers. The utilities admit that the meters are not hacker-proof. One "benefit" was supposed to be that the utility could initiate or terminate service without sending anyone to the site. It turns out that other people may be able to do the same. Businesses and controversial organizations could become the victims of "activitists" tampering with their power. Customers are being made to pay a monthly fee for the meter, while utilities receive economic stimulus funds for the same equipment. My utility, CenterPoint, has received $200 million in these funds. I have now been paying for a smart meter for a year, but, did I mention that I don't have one. The Texas state Public Utilities Commission allowed the utilities to start billing everyone for the meters while they slowly replace the existing meters. The greatest benefit of the "smart meters" goes to the utility as they collect tax-payer money from the government, AND get to add a monthly charge to our bills. And this is for a piece of equipment necessary to their business, and which will allow them to lay off meter readers and other personnel who presently have to go to the customer's location. What a rip off!
