Smart grid baby steps: smart meters (metres?) in the U.K.

Helping homeowners monitor electricity use 6

One piece of the smart-grid puzzle is home electricity monitoring -- allowing homeowners (and eventually business and factory owners) to track their electricity use in real time. As the old saw goes, what gets measured gets done. Simply making people aware of energy flows is the first step to helping them modulate those flows efficiently.

On that note, it's fantastic to see this: soon, every household in the U.K. will be able to request a smart meter and have it installed for free.

The next step, of course, is giving homeowners more automated control. One part of that is smart, grid-networked appliances that can modulate their electricity use based on current power availability and pricing. Another part is giving homeowners a way to store energy, so they can shift to stored energy at peak hours when electricity prices are higher (assuming variable pricing is put in place) -- plug-in hybrids are the low-hanging fruit there. Another is net metering, which would allow homeowners to feed power back into the grid if they're generating a surplus (through rooftop solar or wind or whatnot).

Anyway, it's coming together, slowly.

David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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  1. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 1:59 pm
    17 Apr 2007

    I am going to make a prediction thathouses with those meters will greatly reduce energy consumption.

    In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

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  2. JMG's avatar

    JMG Posted 2:41 pm
    17 Apr 2007

    They're already available hereA Canadian company has politely, quietly, without wanting to seem too pushy, developed and offered a whole-house electric meter that requires no rewiring or other fooling around with the hot stuff--just snap the pickup monitor on your meter, set up your receiver in the kitchen, and away you go, watching your various choices make the meter spin.  They report a 20% drop in consumption with no other conservation measures.
    CHECK this out
    http://www.save-electricity.ca/technology.html

    "An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."

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  3. scatter Posted 6:59 pm
    17 Apr 2007

    There's also the Electrisave and Wattsonhttp://www.electrisave.co.uk/


    http://www.diykyoto.com/

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  4. Parmesan Posted 8:59 pm
    17 Apr 2007

    A little pedantryIn British spelling:

    Metre: the unit of length used in the metric system

    Meter: a device for measurement

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  5. Energy745 Posted 1:22 am
    18 Apr 2007

    Nothing is freeThere is no practical way to store electric power in a home.  Electric power must be consumed as soon as it is produced.

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  6. Engineer Posted 6:12 am
    18 Apr 2007

    One small nit...A Labour Party spokesman said that the monitors were not the latest generation of meters, known as "smart meters".
    The device in the article would not interface with smart appliances or any other automated control systems.
    The 2005 Energy Policy Act requires U.S. utilities to go through a public hearing process to consider the use of 'real' smart meters and/or time of use metering.  

    Common sense is an oxymoron...

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