Meter-related energy savings are small, but can add up

A major energy-use research project just published in the UK finds that, while individual households equipped with smart meters might not always cut their electricity consumption by much, the savings generated nationwide would be substantial.

British energy regulator Ofgem launched the Energy Demand Research Project (EDRP) before officials unveiled plans to equip the entire nation with smart meters by 2020. In addition to smart energy meters, the project sought to assess the effectiveness of a range of other efficiency-focused programs.

Among the findings:

• Smart meters, when combined with real-time displays showing consumption data, consistently resulted in energy savings of around 3 percent. That figure sometime was higher or lower, though, depending on the fuel being measured (electricity or gas), the customer group and the time period.
• The addition of a real-time display to a smart meter generally led to energy savings that were 2 to 4 percent higher than that with smart meters alone.
• Programs that didn’t include a smart meter failed to generate any significant reductions in energy consumption, with two exceptions from just one of the four energy companies participating: Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) reported seeing small savings — around 1 percent — when customers received clip-on real-time displays showing their energy use or were provided with “benchmarking” information about how their consumption compared to that of comparable households.
• Customers not only hated EDF’s test of a noise alarm to indicate when their consumption levels were high, but didn’t cut their energy use even after hearing the signal. A “traffic lights”-style visual display of high or low consumption, on the other hand, earned a thumbs-up from the greatest number of customers.

The energy research project involved four energy companies — EDF, E.ON, Scottish Power and SSE — between 2007 and 2010. The study group included more than 60,000 households, including 18,000-plus that were equipped with smart meters.

While the energy savings resulting from the use of smart meters were “sometimes small in percentage terms,” Ofgem noted, “the absolute savings scaled up to national level would be substantial.”