By Paul Homewood
Claire Perry is getting ever more desperate in her defence of smart meters. Reacting to the latest critical report from the NAO. she says:
Dial-up internet access, VHS and rotary phones are quite rightly consigned to history, and now we can order anything at a click of a button and can stream Netflix from your smart TV while booking our next holiday on your smart phone.
Given this technological revolution in our daily lives, it’s quite frankly baffling that many of us still think it’s normal to grab a torch, sweep away cobwebs and hunker down under the stairs to get readings from our ancient, dusty electricity and gas meters. But if you don’t face this hassle, you risk an estimated bill way out of line with your actual energy use, potentially paying more or less each month causing cash flows and direct debits to fluctuate, making it difficult for families to budget.
It doesn’t have to be like this. The smart choice is a smart meter. Customers across Great Britain have already chosen to install more than 12 million smart meters in their homes and small businesses. These devices give them real-time information about their energy use in pounds and pence and provide meter readings to suppliers automatically, putting an end to estimated bills. Smart meters give people control over their energy use, help them make choices to save money and give households more information so they can switch to cheaper deals. Better information also encourages consumers to be take more savvy actions, such as buying more energy efficient appliances or switching to LED lighting.
I don’t know anybody who has meters amid cobwebs, but if they don’t like them, they can easily pay to have them shifted.
As for references to dial up internet and VHS, it was not government diktat that replaced them with something better. And the replacements were not funded by £11bn of taxpayers’ money.
That is the conservative estimate of the cost of the smart meter roll out, which even the NAO reckon could now rise to £14bn, all to be paid for on energy bills.
And the benefits? Let’s see what the NAO have to say:
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/rolling-out-smart-meters/
These are “savings” over the period 2013 to 2030. Whilst the costs of roll out are very real and very current, the benefits are ephemeral and, if they arise at all, will be spread over many years.
Claire Perry likes to rattle on about how smart energy will make our energy networks so much more efficient. In reality, the claimed benefits of £0.8bn and £0.9bn for network benefits and peak load shifting are tiny, especially when spread over a decade or more. Indeed they are so tiny as to be significantly meaningless.
In any event, the NAO cast grave doubts on whether even these small savings would actually materialise.
We then have £1.4bn of “Environmental Benefits”, which won’t actually save bill payers a penny.
The only substantial items are Energy Savings and Suppliers’ Cost Savings.
The theory is that customers will use less energy when they sit looking at their smart meters and realise how much that cup of tea cost.
The NAO, however, find that the available evidence for this is “inconclusive”, and that previous Department estimates of energy savings from energy saving schemes have been grossly overestimated.
To that I would add the human factor. While people may see smart meters as new toys and play with them for a while, after a while they get forgotten about.
At the end of the day, of course, it is down to the individual. If you really want to reduce energy bills, there are all sorts of ways to do it, without the need for a smart meter.
As for supplier costs, most of the saving revolves around call centre and other admin costs (£2.3bn) and the cost of meter reading (£3.0bn).
Since the smart meter programme was first mooted, technology has moved on. Anybody with an internet connection now has the ability to send meter readings online, thus automatically generating invoices. In short, there is no need for suppliers to send out meter readers, or post meter reading cards (along of course with all of the administration which follows.)
As a back stop, there is already a statutory requirement for energy suppliers to regularly carry out safety tests on meters, which would spot any faulty meters of fraud.
Savings on admin costs were thought to arise from dealing with estimated readings, queries and so on. However, the NAO is sceptical about this. They believe that the problems of supporting a mix of SMETS1, SMETS2 and legacy meters is likely to add to operational costs.
They also say that the risk of defects in future could increase contact between customers and suppliers.
In short, the claimed benefits at the very least are highly dubious, while the costs are very real.
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November 24, 2018 at 07:39AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 