The Guardian two weeks ago featured an anguished reader’s
letter concerned about the invasion of privacy involved in the installation of
smart meters in UK households. It’s worth reflecting briefly on what the
privacy and security issues might be, what the real social value of smart
meters might be, and how we should balance these with an effective policy.
Smart meters, and I have just acquired one for my
electricity supply, will tell you a number of things that you might have found
it difficult to work out previously. These may include for example what your
power use (in watts or kilowatts) is at any instant in time, what it was in the
last few hours, days or months. The privacy concern is that the utility, your
supplier, can be assumed to have the capability to collect and keep this data,
and, for example, could build up a picture of the minute by minute electricity
consumption of every household with a smart meter.
There are many, not particularly sinister, reasons why
utilities might want to do this. At a minimum it can provide a better
understanding of how consumers use electricity can help in planning future system
needs, make sure that local networks have adequate capacity to cope with
fluctuations in load, and so on.
On privacy and security issues we should perhaps be far more
worried about the amount of sensitive information held on you by your bank and
your credit or store card issuer, not to mention Facebook, Google and your
telecoms supplier, or, and, currently in the news, the airlines you use.
Between them these have tons of information about your shopping habits,
lifestyle, opinions, financial affairs, favourite websites, and so on, all of
which, if privacy and security are breached, potentially give rise to much more
serious abuses than someone being able to work out what time a household has
breakfast or runs the washing machine.
It’s also certainly true, as a number of readers are
testifying, that the government has not fully thought through its policy objectives
on smart meters, and that the programme is unlikely to deliver many of the
promised benefits, at least in the short term. And of course there are as usual
a lot of horror stories on installation failures. But none of this should blind
us to the fact that there is a huge and essential future for devices which
create a much closer connection between the way we use energy, and electricity
in particular, and the factors that constrain when and how it is produced and
delivered.
Let us take a simple future example. We expect a big future
for electric vehicles. This has the potential to create big spikes in load,
with everyone switching on together, in a period when we will depend
increasingly on renewable energy sources which are much more variable than
currently, and harder to match to varying consumer demand. One answer to this
is for some EV owners to charge their vehicles overnight, but for the timing of
that supply to be at the discretion of the supplier, who can match it to when
production is available to meet it. In exchange for this surrender of direct
control, consumers will get a much more favourable tariff for their EVs, and
the practical issues of managing network overload, when all EV owners try to
re-charge their vehicles immediately on return from work, can be avoided. This obviously
implies an element of intrusion, in the sense that the utility “knows” the purpose
of the load it is required to meet. It also assigns a choice (over timing) from
the consumer to the utility. But this is a commercial transaction, willingly entered
on both sides, providing benefits to both parties.
Smart meters are just a starting point for more
sophisticated and user friendly tariff and conditions of use arrangements which
can redefine the ways we use energy. No doubt there will be privacy issues to
be managed, but essentially these will be no different in character from the
privacy issues we encounter in relation to almost all our transactions with
businesses large and small. They will be substantially less than most of those
that we face in relation to financial transactions, social media and our day to
day use of IT and the internet..
Some of the benefits that can flow from more sophisticated
metering and tariffs are highlighted in a report published last week by Energy Systems
Catapult, which starts to explore the numerous tariff issues highlighted by
progress towards a low carbon economy.
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