8 reasons we need smart energy meters

Why are so many communities around the globe making it a priority to replace their old electricity and gas meters with newer, smarter ones? There are plenty of good reasons:

1. Because it’s not your father’s energy anymore. Today’s energy mix is far more complex than it was a generation ago, and it’s only going to grow more complicated. With more and more wind and solar energy coming into the grid, and an expected increase in the number of electric cars over time, it will be more important than ever to know who’s using how much electricity where, and when.
2. Because they pay off. A recently concluded large-scale, year-long trial of smart meters in Ireland shows there’s a measurable return on investment, both in terms of energy saved and carbon emissions reduced.
3. Because they might pay off for you. With more places adopting feed-in tariffs — financial incentive for small-scale renewables — homeowners, small businesses, schools and other organisations could actually earn money for selling their wind- or solar-generated power back to the grid. Who here wants to sell their energy without knowing exactly how much they’re producing?
4. Because energy is a finite resource. Whether your electricity comes from coal power or nuclear power, wind or solar, no energy source can be ramped up without limits to meet the needs of an increasingly large, and increasingly middle-class (that is, energy-hungry) world population. We’ve all heard the expression, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Well, how can you manage energy supplies for up to 7 billion people — 9 billion by mid-century — without accurately measuring what comes in and what goes out?
5. Because carbon has a cost. Carbon dioxide emissions have long been an external cost that didn’t enter the balance sheet in our energy bills. No longer. Policy-makers in places like Europe and California have made it a priority to reduce carbon emissions to prevent climate change from tipping into the danger category, and that means regulations that require businesses, industries and government agencies to cut their carbon footprints. Again, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
6. Because the grid needs all the smarts it can get. In the US in particular, much of the energy infrastructure is decades old, and its age is starting to show. Power failures on the grid are rising in both number and length, and they’re costing the economy billions.
7. Because this is one area where it makes sense to try and ‘keep up with the Joneses.’ Smarter energy meters have already been deployed en masse across Italy and the Nordic region, and no one’s found a reason to un-deploy them yet.
8. Because dumb won’t cut it in an era of smart. If you can track stock prices in real time from your phone and monitor cumulative global carbon emissions from your laptop, how much sense does it make to have your electricity bill based on a once-a-month (or, in some extreme cases, even once-a-year) manual reading by a utility company employee who stomps through your yard to read a 25-year-old analog meter on your house?