Posh Boys push Smart Meters

DECC – the Government department leading the Smart Metering deployment in the UK recently published their latest research on consumer attitudes to Smart Metering.  It reports the results of in depth interviews with 120 representative members of the population on their feelings about Smart Meters and IHDs.

The research was conducted in February this year, several months before the Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorries described her Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne as “two posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk”.  She wasn’t referring to the UK Smart Metering programme, but it was a pretty good description of what these 120 respondents thought of the smart meter deployment, telling researchers that it “sounds like it’s from someone who doesn’t have trouble paying their bills”.

The report is not all bad news.  The respondents included people who had received In Home Energy Displays and in general they liked them.  They thought they provided real benefits.  In contrast, they had difficulty in seeing what the added value of the smart meter was.

I suspect DECC is busy trying to massage the results to make it look as if the survey supported smart metering, helped by some rather ambiguous leading questions.  But the content highlights a growing division within the smart metering programme, which is whether it is meant to be there for the benefit of consumers or for the benefit of utilities?

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A UK Roadmap for Smart Metering HANs

One of the eternal complaints about short range wireless is its limited range, particularly when used within homes.  Whilst the name “short range wireless” ought to give a clue about the existence of the problem, it doesn’t stop a general level of indignation when a radio signal doesn’t make it through the walls of your house.

Up until now this was mostly an annoyance, largely because it was a personal problem.  By that I mean it was an inconvenient truth that individuals discovered when they bought a consumer wireless product, whether that was a Wi-Fi access point, a cordless phone or a mobile headset.  As these were generally low cost, discretionary purchases, users either took them back, put them in a cupboard and forgot about them, or worked around the problem by moving the appropriate access point.  For the more technically engaged, a raft of companies grew up making repeaters, range extenders, power amplifiers and directional antennae, allowing users to exacerbate the problem by swamping all of their neighbours’ installations.

In the last year people have started to take the middle word of “short range wireless” rather more seriously.  That’s come about as governments around the world have mandated deployments of smart meters.  Whilst no-one cared too much if a consumer product didn’t work, smart meters are a different kettle of fish.  They need to be able to connect with the other components of the smart metering wireless network in the home in order to send consumption data back to the utilities.  They have to do that reliably and regularly over a period of many years.  And they need to be able to cope with a wide variety of homes – from small bungalows to multi-storey apartment buildings.  All of a sudden that “range” word is getting a lot of attention.

The problem is that the wireless standards being considered don’t cover 100% of different homes.  Any one standard probably struggles with covering much more than 75% of potential homes.  That’s a big problem for regulators and civil servants who have a very black and white view of life – when a mandate says “all”, they assume that means every last home.  So what can they do?

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