Closed data will be the death of smart meters

In early June, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) published the results of smart meter field trials, concluding that "in some cases there was little effect on home comfort, as actions focused on unnecessary consumption, while in others the effect was noticeable - for example, a colder and darker home".

This reveals a stark truth. Smart meters do not, in themselves, provide a value proposition to consumers. Cutting unnecessary consumption is not the same as fundamental “new” savings, while colder darker homes are not acceptable to the modern consumer. So much money is now riding on smart meters as the answer – £12 billion, to be precise – that the question has been forgotten: how do we embed energy and carbon savings in the domestic sector?

As shown by Decc’s conclusion, the answer does not lie in metering incentives alone. It lies in offering consumers a golden triangle of cost ­savings, comfort and control. At best, smart metering offers only one of these. At worst, it will just create an advanced billing system for energy suppliers. This narrow outcome will catastrophically erode trust in both the energy sector and the government.

Such a result will be virtually guaranteed if the government does not open up smart meter data. At present, there is a risk data will be supplied in a raw, unusable form to homeowners, via kWh displays, and a highly usable form to suppliers and district network operators. But usable for what? Billing and network upgrades – not for saving energy.

For data to support deep, ongoing savings it must be provided to home energy management platforms, in real time, via the home area network. Proposals for data to be held by a Data Communications Company go some way towards allaying privacy concerns. However, if such data is only released retrospectively it does nothing to drive day-to-day – and hour-to-hour – automated load management and energy-purchasing decisions in the home.

Failing to do so will mean the creation of parallel, customer-side systems to monitor consumption for energy management purposes rather than simply billing. It is not difficult to guess which architecture will be more trusted by consumers, but it is difficult to see how the government will respond if asked why the centrally planned smart meter rollout does not itself fulfil this role. This is especially the case when legislation is couched specifically in terms of – as the EC Energy Efficiency Plan puts it – creating a “well functioning and interoperable market for energy services” that “allows for new services to emerge around the development of smart grids”.

Automated load management is the “new service” par excellence because it positively affects value for all stakeholders: the consumer via lower bills; the energy sector via greater grid flexibility; and the government via lower energy intensity and better integration of renewables. Failure to embed interoperability will carry a corresponding cost across all the same stakeholders and be a huge own goal for the government.

The USA has taken steps towards open data with the voluntary Green Button programme, which allows consumers simple access to energy-use data drawn from smart meters. Decc should also pursue open data to send a clear signal that it encourages competition and the development of new consumer-centred models around home energy management and tariff competition. A standard like Green Button could support the latter goal by accessing online utility ratings tables to allow users – or their home energy management platforms – to verify that they are with the right provider and tariff for their usage.

Without these types of data-sharing, however, we will just see the ­retrenchment of incumbent models which will continue to disempower consumers – but under a new wrapper called smart metering.

Ian Rose, professional services director, PassivSystems

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 29 June 2012.

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