I’m all for smart meters but that’s what they have to be – smart, not just a convenience for the power companies. A true smart meter will benefit consumers, retailers and the environment. Climate change is a reality and true smart meters can help to reduce our carbon footprint by reducing the number of power stations that need to be built. Smart meters need to be paired over time with ‘smart appliances’ that can be programmed to switch on and off at times that low power prices are available. This will allow New Zealanders to plan their energy use and save on power bills.
Last year we published New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy which included setting the standard for smart meters. Will Gerry Brownlee have the smarts to see the revolution this will bring to power consumption? If we judge by the lost opportunities he has already missed in his energy portfolio, I don’t hold out much hope.
[Take a week off Redbaiter - admin]
Can those smart meters also measure the power backwards so that people can sell excess power generated at home (using sustainable generation techniques) back to the power companies? Investing in solar power generators at home would become common if people, instead of getting a power bill at the end of each month, got a cheque.
Hey, RB, go read a book. Hell, even just the web-page for the book.
redbaiter, you are not in the market for power, you are just fed it at a fixed rate by power companies.
This is about giving consumers an opening into the electricity market. How the hell could you demand a smart meter? You do not even know what it is.
Can you find the live spot price at the moment because I can not? Is it publicly available anywhere?
Or are you arguing from an ideological position, which is inadvertantly contrary to what you appear to believe?
NEWS FLASH: redbaiter demands public remain in enforced ignorance and barred from competitive market!
Don’t feed the Redbaiter troll guys….
Anyway, staying on topic, yes I agree the smart meters need to be smarter.
Frankly this reeks of a big PR stunt by the Commissioner to try and force her ideas onto the market. She seems most upset that it is industry making the running on this rather than government, and doing what it thinks is best rather than what she wants. I’m not convinced she is as all knowing as is implied, especially as she has not put this report out for consultation before reaching her conclusions.
She seems to want HAN chips put in now yet, as was pointed out today on Radio NZ, there is not even a globally agreed standard for HAN chips. Did you know Google have launched a web based tool that doesn’t require smart meters to monitor home energy use? So she may be forcing NZ down a technology dead end.
Her recommendations don’t seem strongly supported by the underlying reports she commissioned. There seems a lot of wishful thinking. The Concept report doesn’t recommend being prescriptive and says the benefits of in house displays is very uncertain. It specifically warns that overseas studies are not a good guide for NZ. The Strata report says many of the environmental benefits of smart meters can be provided by not-smart meters.
I found it odd that she hasn’t called for mandatory chips in household appliances, in fact the subject is completely ignored! Yet a smart meter is useless without smart appliances. IMO they are important in driving demand for smart meter services.
Oh and while we’re at it let’s make HANs compulsory in homes too. Again, this is not even addressed yet is a vital link in hte chain. That is a major weakness in her conclusions.
There is also no time frame. WHat she wants is chips of an uncertain standard to be installed to deliver a functionality that appliances may not be able to widely deliver for 10 years or more, bearing in mind the lifetime of appliances (eg if I bought a dishwasher in the next 3 years it is unlikely to have a HAN chip. I will have that for probably 10 years so couldn’t access the smart meter benefits for that device until I bought a new one in 13 year time. IN other words there will be a huge lag in demand for smart functionality).
WHere’s the sense in that? Isn’t it better to provide the option for chips to be installed when the technology path is clear and when consumers actually can use it.
Smart meters sound cool. Forced exposure to the spot market doesn’t.
Give it a rest, Redbaiter.
Maynard
http://www.electricityinfo.co.nz
Insider, I had a look for that to no avail. That is pretty cool.
One of the things smart meters can do, without smart appliances, is tell you not homw much power you are using, but what it is costing, although that is of limited utility without appliances that can react to that information.
I/S – that depends if you think the current market is a good one. Reform of the market itself so all pricing isn’t dictated by the highest cost per kw/h generator would be a start. I have an idea that we pay quite a premium for not paying spot prices, but would be interested in reading up if anyone has seen anything that goes over this.
Maynard
Any meter will tell you what power usage is ‘costing’ just by looking at how fast it is spinning. It’s not that insightful to know that the more I switch on the more it will cost. I’m sure there is a much cheaper way of creating an in-house display that connects to your exisiting meter than changing it completely. It’s probably more that you get no benefit from load shifting on fixed prices so why bother.
Smart meters will give an advantage if you are linked to live prices or time of day based tariffs rather than on fixed prices, so you can assess the benefit of load shifting in real time.
One of the ironies of the PCE report is that it says people should not have to go onto spot pricing. But that undermines one of the key rationales for smart meters. So why make all the fuss about mandating unspecified HAN chips when people won’t have to use them? Bizarre.
I/S
Spot prices are averaging 6-9c/kwh at present, and winter is the expensive period. What are you paying fixed rate? 23-25ckwh? Why do you fear being exposed to such low prices? (ok I know they are not truly comparable… point is, fear might be clouding the facts)
Insider: spot prices were $500 / MWh at peak last night, which is when most households use most of their power. And the realities of diurnalism and the working weak means that that demand can not realistically be shifted to lower-cost periods (economists may eat their dinner at 4am because it is “more efficient” for them to do so. Real people do not). _That’s_ the problem. And that’s without even getting into the horrors of dry years…
Effectively, a residential flat rate is a hedge against peak and dry year prices. You can argue that it is priced incorrectly, that retailer markups are too high or that the probability of a dry year is overestimated, but it doesn’t seem horrifically so, and the overall principle is sound. If retailers weren’t offering it, someone would have to invent it for them.
I/S
They didn’t get quite that high in Wellington. Must be all that expensive windpower you have in your area.
In the SI they maxed out at $70.
You are right about the hedge, but the problem with that is that it discourages efficiency and innovation. It also means low cost areas subsidise high cost – as shown above.
No reason why you couldn’t disable your fridge/freezer over such times with no harm. It’s done for hot water. Wouldn’t it make sense for consumers to know the cost of electricity for cooking vs gas? Heating could be managed through storage heaters – remember them?
So there are probably more things that could reduce your exposure than you think, and dropping demand could radically alter the spot price – the next down generator might only be a fraction of the price of the marginal one. You never know, the power company might even pay you to reduce demand to stop being exposed to $500 spot prices.
Some people will like that risk exposure some won’t. We tend to focus on the short periods of $500/MWh and ignore the longer periods of $20-30. See the price distribution graphs at http://www.electricityinfo.co.nz/media_releases/May_2009_Reference_Prices.xls
“You are right about the hedge, but the problem with that is that it discourages efficiency and innovation.”
Big deal. I want security of costs – not being forced to “innovate” by cooking my dinner at 4am, or do without heating in winter. because the latter is apparently what the Mercury Energy TOU trial shows happens when you stick people on these things.
I like the idea of monitoring and managing everything which a smart meter makes possible; I want the better information smart metes make possible. But I don’t want to be exposed to the spot market, and there’s no reason why I should have to be. And if greedy power companies think it would be “more efficient” if I was, they can bite me.
Or, to put it another way: while I’m an information geek, i see no reason why I should reduce my financial security simply to conform to someone else’s dead economic dogma. I had enough of that during the 80′s and 90′s, thanks.
did anyone say you had to…?
Re the trial you mention, interesting that, because Jan Wright was trumpeting that load reduction as a darn good reason to promote smart meters. Personally, I don’t think less is best.
I also don’t necessarily think that less is best. And I agree with I/S that there could be some pretty nasty unintended outcomes of exposing people to spot prices – do we really want them cutting back on heating on the very coldest of winter nights?
In the future I think that we’re going to need a heck of a lot more power. As fossil fuel production peaks and then declines we will have to be running our cars off electricity, and eventually gas will become prohibitively expensive so all gas stoves and heaters will probably switch to electricity. As long as this power is generated by non-emitting renewables there’s really no downside to using more and more power.
I/S,
I get not wanting households to be exposed to the full pain of the spot market, but I also believe in ripple control to turn off hot water cylinders when power use is at its peak, and night store heaters which use middle-of-the-night cheap hydro. I accept (grudgingly) that price signals work, and that high spot prices are a good indicator of the most environmentally damaging power.
I’d be happiest with some kind of moderated mechanism (like traditional ripple control pricing) where I could get a flat discounted rate for power to some appliances on the condition that they’ll be off for a couple of hours a day when they’d otherwise be powered by burning fossil fuels. That sounds safe.
The problem is that we appear to have a slipperly slope, what say I’m willing to take a huge discount for some appliances to only have power when it can’t be driving fossil fuel demand (so the spot price is very very low)? As a comfortably middle class person who wants that option for some discretionary kitchen appliances (I’m ok with hydro for a fruit juicer, but I’ll use elbow grease rather than burning gas or diesel) that sounds safe. But what about the poor family with sick children or older family members who put their heating onto that plan?
I dunno, I think I have made myself less sure while typing
Spot pricing for homes? No Thanks.
Yeah, that’s the same theory that we used to privatize and deregulate as well and otherwise referred to as Reaganism, Rogernomics and Thatcherism.
As for gas? Estimated peak is sometime between 2020 and 2030.
Considering that we’ll be down to basic sunlight I don’t think there’s going to be more and more power available sometime in the near future. The problem with basic sunlight is summed up here.
Draco, New Zealand has pretty significant potential to generate additional renewable base-load capacity from geothermal and tidal power. I think Cook Strait has some of the strongest tidal currents in the world – and it’s well positioned to supply power to wherever it’s needed in the country. The mouth of the Kaipara Harbour also has some good potential.
We dont need ‘smart meters’, what we do need is the return of the electricty utility industry to public control as a non-profit utility (ie the Electricty Department/Power board), with private operators of power stations contracted to supply power to the national grid at an agreed rate where applicable – saves any accusations of Stalinism.
millsy
The vast majority of it is publicy controlled…Non profit probably means that things will get done for the reasons that suit engineers rather than consumers. When engineers ran the system it was far less reliable than it is under the market.