It’s Time For Sun, Sea And… Smart Meters

So the government has finally decided to put some meat on the bones of its smart meter plans.

The long awaited Smart Metering Implementation Programme Prospectus was released this week in the last proper splurge of business before the dog days of summer. Not much of a fanfare then for what the government admits will be one of the biggest public sector tech projects of recent times.

But then any news is good news right now with the silly season looming – another week and the tech press will be awash with the usual summer space fillers of “How to stay connected to the office while on vacation” or “Top tech books to take to the beach”. While it might be exciting to engage the conspiracy synapses and imagine government spin-doctors trying to bury some Machiavellian smart meter sub-plot – the truth is probably just that this much material takes time to accumulate.

And what a pile there is. Never mind summer reading, anyone interested in how the government intends to pull-off this feat will be eschewing Stephen King and Dean Koontz in favour of Chris Huhn. The smart meter prospectus might not be exactly beach reading material but some aspects of it seem every bit as fanciful as a bestseller.

A Fantasy Bestseller?

The most obvious example of this is the new timetable the government has set. The EU electricity and gas directives behind the UK’s smart meter push mandate 2020 as the date for the deployment. That might still be nearly ten years away but even that seemed ambitious given the small fact that the country is broke and most other large-scale public sector tech projects have been mothballed or scrapped as the coalition furiously bails out our collective life-boat. The rash of tech quangos that have been nuked in the last few weeks, together with high-profile cuts such as ID Cards and Microsoft losing its lucrative NHS deal, show exactly how much cash and good will there is available for tech projects in Whitehall right now.

Despite some pre-election stories about cosying up to Google, the coalition government has not exactly endeared itself to the tech industry so far. Even the hip games industry’s attempts to get a tax break were shot to pieces, Call-Of-Duty-style, by George Osborne.

But not smart meters. Not only is the government backing the project wholeheartedly, it wants to deploy smart meters in the UK’s 28 million homes and small businesses ahead of time. The prospectus indicates that the infrastructure to support the roll-out should be in place by 2013, with the roll-out of the meters themselves beginning in earnest around that time. Some reports have claimed that the government wants the whole project done and dusted by 2016 if possible.

However as anyone familiar with the sheer scale of this project will concede, there are an awful lot of ‘ifs’involved. Where to start? Cost is probably a good place considering the state of the public coffers right now. Yes, smart meters could help consumers reduce their bills. And there will probably be efficiencies and cost savings for utilities too when they have the associated smart grid infrastructure up and running. The government puts the net benefits at about £7 billion in savings but it is not clear how they did their sums.

More than £7 billion in savings?

Current estimates of the smart meter elements of the project are around £3.6 billion over the next 20 years, which seem hopelessly out of whack. The ID Card project – which stalled halfway through – spiralled to more than £5 billion. And that was just about giving everyone a small bit of plastic with some database tech to support. Smart meters and the associated grid overhaul will be in another league altogether in terms of scale. Potentially one or two wireless devices installed in every home in the UK, capable of talking not only to the utilities smart grid infrastructure but to the so-called “In-Home Display” (which lets consumers see what they are consuming) as well as electrical devices in the home. Don’t let anyone tell you this is not a massive undertaking.

There is obviously the issue of how much consumers can expect to save. It goes without saying that utilities fully expect to make “efficiencies” by being able to sack meter-readers, for example, and do everything remotely. But will more granular information really translate into smaller bills for energy consumers? In the US, where the rollout is accelerating due to finite availability of the government funding to support it, there have been reports that smart meter users are actually finding their bills going up. Consumers might have more accurate information on what they are using – but so do the utilities, and some are putting this information to good effect.

And the comparisons with ID Cards don’t stop at cost projections. Security and privacy are also a fundamental issue. The government is taking pains to make sure there is a public consultation on the process, to make sure that it doesn’t feel like this is simply all about streaming information from consumers homes to powerful utilities. But the aggressive timetable for the project has pushed some experts – commentating on similarly tight deadlines in the US – to postulate that security and privacy will take a back-seat to rolling-out the devices as fast as possible. Get them out there and worry about the other stuff later.

Public Backlash

Whether there will be an ID Card public backlash against smart meters is hard to say. At the moment the main public reaction appears to be apathy mixed with scepticism, if a report into consumer attitudes to the meters released alongside the prospectus is anything to go by. Only a third of those questioned had even heard of them. The government is going to be putting wireless boxes into millions of homes and no one seems to know or care right now.

That may all change when the first smart meter scare stories emerge into the mainstream. For now, the various stakeholders – including consumers – have until October to reply to the government’s prospectus. Given the current level of awareness, the government is unlikely to be swamped by concerned citizens, but maybe that is the idea.

This project needs as much scrutiny as possible and I will be doing my bit to help. Just as long as I can find some room in my suitcase. Nothing goes better with a sun-lounger and a cold-drink than a nice fantasy page-turner. Only time will tell if it’s a best-seller or destined for the bargain bin.