Saving Energy – The Myth of Vampire Power

There’s nothing like an energy crisis to bring out the urban myths about what’s stealing all of our electricity.  The most prevalent of these is the concept of vampire or phantom power, where devices which are left plugged in or on standby are demonised, with the claim that they consume kiloWattHours of energy, pushing up our bills.  Given that electricity prices in the UK look set to triple this year, that’s a big worry.  However, many of the figures I see being used to support this are decades old, which means that some of the advice being given is misleading or downright wrong.  So I thought it would be a good time to look at exactly how much power our devices actually take, so that people can make informed decisions.

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Smart Meter update – Let’s do a DDOS

If you’ve been following the GB Smart Metering story, you’ll already know that it is one of the worst examples of a Government led IT disaster, which has already cost the taxpayer around £20 billion.  In the latest twist to the sorry saga, we have just had the bizarre phenomenon of National Meter Reading Day, when millions of energy consumers effectively performed a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the 31st March, by submitting their energy readings.  It resulted in the websites of most of our leading energy suppliers crashing.

The background to this is that consumer energy prices in the UK have just taken a substantial hike.  On the 1st April, a price cap enforced by the Government was lifted, allowing energy suppliers to raise tariffs.  On his popular Money Show Live TV program, Martin Lewis urged customers to make a note of their meter readings on 31st April and to submit them to their supplier’s website.  The following message went viral:

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NetZero nepotism – Boris’ COP26 cop out

Back in 2010, I was the CTO of a small energy startup, designing connected domestic energy sensors, along with some fairly hardcore data analytics, to help consumers work out what was contributing to their energy bills.  It was a fairly crowded market as small companies saw the potential for promoting energy efficiency to consumers and investigating ways to use emerging battery technologies to smooth out household demand and reduce cost.  Few of those companies survived.  Energy suppliers acquired some, then shut them down as they realised that persuading consumers to spend less money didn’t really fit well with their business model.  The energy suppliers also had bigger issues, such as dealing with the Government’s impending Smart Metering programme.  A few of the startups have survived and were looking forward to renewed interest arising from the UK hosting the COP26 summit.

A couple of months back I started to hear from them that promises to be involved in the events surrounding COP26 were being withdrawn, because space needed to be allocated to other companies that were “closer” to the Government.  It seemed that what you knew was less important than who you knew.  NetZero nepotism appeared to be kicking in.  It felt reminiscent of what we saw at the start of the pandemic, where companies with engineering expertise were asked to help design and build ventilators.  A few months later, those efforts were quietly put on the shelf.  Instead, contracts for PPE and Test & Trace took precedence.  They were easier for Government ministers to comprehend than real engineering, so could be packaged up in marketing campaigns and handed out to the Friends of Dominic and Matty.   This week’s damning report from the Public Accounts Committee has described Test & Trace as “muddled, overstated, with an eye-wateringly expensive budget of over £37 billion, which has failed on its main objectives”.  That £37 billion is not vastly different from what the equally muddled and overstated Smart Metering programme will have cost the consumer by the time it’s complete, showing that the Government is not generally the best judge of who can deliver, or the way to do it.  If we want to achieve our NetZero objectives, it’s vital that we don’t go down the same route.

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Smart Meters, Fake News and the IoT

Do smart meters spread Covid?  Of course they don’t.  Not even the fake news community have suggested that.  As regular readers will know, I’ve been socially distancing from smart meters ever since the British Government took what was basically a good idea and morphed it into a £15 billion IT disaster.  Despite that, I still got Covid.

Do smart meters encourage fake news?  Absolutely.  Here in the UK we have a Government funded agency called Smart Energy GB, which specialises in misleading advertisements in an attempt to persuade people to install the world’s most expensive smart meters.  I believe they may have the honour of producing the largest number of advertisements from a Government body to be banned for misinformation.  But they’re not letting a little issue like that stop them from peddling more fake news. 

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GB Smart Metering no longer financially viable

Last week the British Infrastructure Group (BIG), comprising 93 Members of Parliament and the House of Lords, delivered a devastating report on the British Smart Metering Project.  Titled “Not So Smart”, their headline assessment is that it is a “roll-out which is set to become yet another large scale public infrastructure project delivered well over budget which fails to deliver the expected benefits.”

It is very gratifying to see the issues I’ve been writing about for the last six years confirmed.  In the past, the energy industry and civil servants have succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of various Parliamentary Committees, who, lacking adequate technical expertise, have simply repeated the mantra that the project is more or less on track.  The British Infrastructure Group have cut through that obfuscation.  In their summary they suggest that the average consumer saving will be reduced to just £11 per year.

Whilst I applaud this report, I fear that the group members may still be wearing their rose-tinted ermine.  Their conclusion about the reduced savings comes from looking back at BEIS’ numbers from 2016.  If you look forward at the additional problems and costs which are still in the pipeline it becomes clear that the GB Smart Metering programme is no longer financially viable.  Rather than a saving of £11 per year for each household, it’s more likely to result in an increase in annual energy bills of £67 for the next decade.  With the publication of this report, the last vestiges of BEIS accountability have been ripped away.

Let’s examine what is still going wrong.

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Telling Lies about Smart Meters

What do you do when your smart metering plan isn’t working?  Looking at the efforts of Smart Energy GB, who are tasked with persuading the nation to install 50 million smart meters which aren’t really fit for purpose you do two things:

  • You ask the Government to double your funding with an additional £95 million of public money. Then…
  • You spend it on inaccurate adverts.

The particular advert I’m talking about demonstrates one of two things – either that Smart Energy GB are lying through their teeth, or they can’t add up.  Although given the sad history of this program, there’s a fair chance it could be both.

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