Time to make a better case for metering

Ongoing disputes in several US states indicate that the battle over smart meters is far from done. Fights are taking place over everything from the health-related safety of smart metering to the actual versus promised benefits of better insights into home energy consumption.

Some of these areas of contention are, from the perspective of sustainability and smart cities anyway, a lot less relevant than others. Concerns about any potential health effects of mobile phones, for example, haven’t stopped the massive global adoption of cellular telephony. If smart meters can prove their real-world, immediate value, many more people will likely embrace the technology rather than shun it.

But that value question still presents a big “if” … not only to a segment of consumers, but to some consumer advocates and public officials as well.

In Connecticut, for example, state Attorney General George Jepsen recently asked the Department of Utility Control to reject Connecticut Light & Power’s (CL&P) plan to install 1.2 million smart meters. Jepsen argues that such rollouts should only be approved if they can be proved cost-effective, and claims a pilot conducted by CL&P in 2009 showed “no beneficial impact on total energy usage.”

That stance seems to contradict what CL&P reported in its pilot results, which showed that metering coupled with critical peak pricing (higher prices during times of peak energy demand, coupled with discount prices for off-peak power use) helped customers shift peak demand by 16.1 per cent. (With the addition of “enabling” technologies like smart or automatic controls on thermostats and air conditioners, peak demand dropped even more — by 23.3 per cent.) What Jepsen apparently refers to, though, is that total monthly consumption for customers in the pilot changed very little. In fact, for those in the critical peak pricing segment, overall monthly energy consumption actually rose slightly, by 0.2 per cent.

In other words, the dispute in this case is a disagreement versus apples versus oranges: CL&P says smart metering reduces peak demand significantly while the attorney general’s office says the technology does little to cut total energy consumption. So which matters more?

Obviously, they both matter. Which suggests that these types of disputes indicate utilities still aren’t communicating the benefits of smart metering to the public as well as they should.