smart meter Archives - Creative Connectivity

Mr Smart Meter takes charge of UK energy policy

What could possibly go wrong?

Back in 2009, when Ed Miliband was Energy Secretary in the closing days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, he announced Britain’s Smart Metering programme, promising to install smart meters in 26 million homes by 2020. He stressed that “it’s important we design a system that brings best value to everyone involved”, with projected consumer savings of billions of pounds. Fifteen years later, it’s still floundering, having cost consumers over £20 billion. Now Ed’s back as our energy supremo.

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 31^st 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 1^st 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 31^st April and to submit them to their supplier’s website. The following message went viral:

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.

When Smart Meters go wrong

Most people don’t think much about firmware – the embedded software which runs the microcontrollers in all of the devices we have around us. We’re aware of the frustration when they don’t do what they’re meant to, at which point we realise that “smart” may not have been the best adjective to use to promote the product, but even when they do go wrong, turning them off and on again, or taking the battery out generally clears the problem. They almost always go wrong because the design process didn’t include enough testing, or not enough time was given over to thinking about the “edge cases” – those unexpected combinations of events which result in things not working the way they should. Most of the time it’s just a short-term annoyance; if it’s worse than that we’ll probably send it back, or throw it out and buy a new one.

However, we do expect safety critical devices like cars and planes and national infrastructure to be a lot better designed than this. Your boiler turning off because it thinks there’s a flow problem when there isn’t is annoying (time for a firmware upgrade please, Vailant), but it’s not life threatening. In contrast, a self-driving car that runs over a cyclist is not something the public is generally happy about. Nor is a plane falling out of the sky. But where would you put a smart meter in the scale of things that might affect your life? Last week we found out, and it’s not a happy answer.

How to Hack a Smart Meter and Kill the Grid

Last week was a watershed for the embedded security community, and by implication everyone else. Bloomberg announced that rogue chips had been found on the motherboards of servers sold by Super Micro Computer to companies like Amazon and Apple. Whoever had added these during the manufacturing process would have acquired the ability to control and access data from the servers when those companies installed them. For the first time, it appeared there was evidence that the supply chain could be disrupted. That meant hacking was happening during the manufacturing process, before the products had even left the production line.

Up until now, hacking has predominantly been viewed as getting malicious code into a device which is “clean”, by exploiting security flaws in its code. That’s what’s happened with every PC virus; attacks like the WannaCry ransomware, and state sponsored attacks such as Stuxnet and the recently discovered attempt by Russian hackers to infiltrate the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Although the concept of hacking a product before it has shipped has been discussed for years, the Bloomberg report signals that we’ve moved from academic debate to reality.

There is still debate about whether the report is correct. Apple and Amazon deny much of the detail, but its publication has started people looking more closely at the supply line and concluding that whether or not it is true, the way we design, subcontract and manufacture complex electronic products today means that it is possible. If it is true, this attack was probably commercial, where a company or a state wanted to discover what leading global companies were doing. What is more worrying is the prospect of a future where malicious state actors target infrastructure with the aim of crippling a country. Which brings me to smart meters.

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.