Switching and the Smart Energy Market

Back in 1776 Adam Smith made the observation that England is a Nation of Shopkeepers (although Napoleon usually gets the credit for the phrase).  If either were alive today they’d probably reconsider and point out that we’re now a nation of Switchers.  Nowhere is that more true than our attitude towards energy suppliers.  According to OFGEM, over 76% of us have switched our energy supplier in the last ten years.  Around 26% of us do it every year.

For some reason, we love switching.  Our favourite TV adverts are for comparison sites.  One – the advert for Compare the Market uses a family of animated meerkats which have become so popular they’ve spawned a range of merchandise.  Whether it’s insurance, energy, mobile phone plans, broadband or saving plans, we’re addicted.  And nowhere more so than with switching energy provider.

It’s not just the websites urging us to do that.  Government ministers keep on telling us that to get the best energy price we should switch suppliers.  Their message is not to use less energy – just change supplier.  And part of their plan for smart metering is to make it even easier to switch – as often as once a day.  It’s creating a very interesting dynamic for the industry, but one that is about to change.

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Making the NHS a Global Brand

The current debate about the future of the NHS starts with a correct observation, which is that continuing in its current form is untenable.  As the population ages and we get more complex treatment regimes, then, unless we change our approach to healthcare, the numbers don’t add up.  But all the Government’s proposed reforms are doing is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.  I’d like to suggest something more radical, which is to think about how to make it self-funding, without increasing the strain on the public purse.  Not by privatising it, but by extracting value from it and then exporting that value.  In other words, let’s see if we can make the NHS a global brand and turn it into something that can generate revenue.

Before you dismiss it, stop and think.  We’ve already done it with the BBC, which Superbrands rates as the fifth strongest brand in the UK.  The BBC is respected and earns money around the world.  Why don’t we think of the NHS in the same way?  It doesn’t feature in any list of brands because nobody thinks of it like that.  But there are some very good reasons why it should, particularly if we want it to be affordable in the future.  The current Government (and every one before it) is missing a trick.

The NHS probably contains more data about treatment and outcomes than any other medical institution in the world.  And so it should.  For much of its life it’s been one of the world’s largest employers, accumulating detailed information on generations of the UK’s 60 million citizens.  That’s an awful lot of “big data”.   So here’s the question – “If we could extract and monetise that value, could we make the NHS pay for itself?”  We need to extract that value and use it, then export the resulting expertise to make money from the rest of the world.

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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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In Praise of Cables

For most of the last twenty or so years I seem to have started off the year by writing an article claiming that this would finally be the one when wireless data takes off.  It’s nice to see things changing: Wi-Fi is finally starting to move outside internet access for PCs and Phone, Bluetooth Smart is appearing in desirable consumer devices and should trigger an avalanche of connected accessories, and smart metering is bringing ZigBee and Wireless M-Bus into homes as a static PAN.  That doesn’t mean that there are not still massive unexplored opportunities in M2M, but it’s good progress.

Instead of the obvious call for more, I’d like to look back at the many advantages of cables.  As designers rush into wireless, it’s easy to forget what they’re giving up.  Wireless offers new opportunities, but only at the expense of many serious compromises.  In this brave new world of wireless it’s apparent that some people are forgetting those compromises.  In this and the following article I’m going to look at what they are and then address the misconception that wireless standards can be treated in the same way as wired ones, debunking the common misconception that they follow the OSI model.

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Sexy Cheese?

There are times when the serendipitous becomes just too compelling and you feel you need to share it with the world.  As I was doing some brand research for a future article I noticed that Neilsen’s recent survey of grocery brands places Dairylea in Position 69.  Does that make it the world’s most sexy cheese?

In an equally serendipitous coincidence, Position 70 in the same survey goes to Innocent.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

The new dumb smart meter model from PG&E

Just as the battle was starting up again for wireless dominance within the smart meter industry, Californian utility Pacific Gas & Energy (PG&E) may have come up with the ultimate answer – don’t turn on the radio in the meter.  It’s one of those cunning plans which will have the various standards body queuing up to make sure they’re responsible for the chip which is never connected.

This bizarre situation arises from the decision back in March this year, when PG&E worked out what to do with their electro-sensitive customers who were demanding that they weren’t radiated with emissions emanating from their smart meters.  PG&E put forward a proposal to make customers pay for non-smart meters, charging somewhere between $135 and $270 a year for the privilege of having a good old-fashioned meter reader come round and leave them a note to say they were out when he called.  The double whammy benefit that none of the media appeared to pick up is that the $270 charge would eat into these user’s mobile phone bill, so they’d have less money to spend on getting radiated by phoning their local papers to campaign against smart meters.  More affluent customers could have the gold plated option of paying several thousand dollars to have their meters moved to the top of local telegraph poles, or buried underground.

PG&E reckoned that this option would be taken up by 185,400 customers.  (I don’t know how they got to that precise figure. Although by a strange coincidence, 1854 is the year that Texas was connected by telegraph to the rest of the US, putting in place the telecoms network that Enron would use so effectively 150 years later.)  Anyway, this number presented PG&E with a problem.  185,400 is not a lot in terms of commissioning a special non-wireless meter.  So they were faced with the prospect of having to pay more for a non-smart meter, wiping out a substantial part of that $50 million annual windfall from their more sensitive customers.  Today they announced a solution – they’d supply the same wireless smart meter, but turn the radio off.  Enter the wirelessless meter.

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