Where’s The Fun In Smart Meters?

The problem with technologists is that they have an unnatural affinity for switches, dials and data. The technically inclined can spend hours fussing over the kind of minutiae which would render a normal person senseless with migraine and boredom. For tech-heads, it’s all in the detail.

Unfortunately this makes the average IT professional pretty poor at anticipating how the mass market might like to spend their time. Take for example interactive TV programmes. Why spend hours passively consuming programming when you could be drilling into the detail, we were told a few years back. That vintage Playstation you noticed in the background of the latest episode of Caprica? Wouldn’t it be great if you could click on it and be transported online to purchase one? Actually no, it wouldn’t.

We can’t be bothered with Interactive TV…

Now, brainless marketing types were certainly as guilty as technologists for a lot of the hype around interactive TV services which has largely come to nothing. Dreams of “monetising dormant content” were probably behind the push to get us all clicking our TV screens but reckless tech thinking certainly played a part too. The main problem with interactive proramming is that a lot of people enjoy the idiot-box precisely because it is a passive medium. At the end of a hard day’s toil in front of a PC, the idea of being fed content is very attractive. Just sit back and bask in the glow of the idiot’s lantern [Editor’s Note – The Idiot’s Lantern is an episode of Doctor Who].

We only have limited reserves of interactive energy and, unfortunately, the latest trend in the world of sustainable IT might drain them further.

So-called smart meters are devices similar to the controllers we already have for central heating or air-conditioning – but apparently much smarter. The devices are the end-points for smart grids, the intelligent networks being developed by utility companies to improve the management of power networks. Smart meters will provide businesses and consumers with accurate information on the energy they use… and more importantly, the energy they waste.

Google has dipped one of its its powerful (but of course benevolent) tentacles into the world of smart meters. As part of its mission to “organise the world’s information”, the search giant has heeded the call to right the wrongs in the energy world by loosening the utility companies’ iron grip on data. Google’s PowerMeter web app effectively plugs into the data being fed to smart meters and gives the user a over-view of their energy outgoings in a handy dashboard. You can even add a little widget to your Google homepage so you’re never more than a mouse-click away from knowing your KWHs to the nearest decimal point.

To help push this vision along, Google and some its smart-grid chums wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to lean on the Department of Energy which in turn will presumably lean on the utilities to start making the data more available than before. Now, while Google is obviously painting its green grid efforts in the sort of benign and altruistic light it reserves for everything it does, more data and information flowing about is all good news for the search giant.

Unfortunately amid this push to equip businesses and home with smart meters – the UK government wants a meter in every home by 2020 – it’s not clear if anyone has stopped to wonder if many people actually want to micromanage their energy usage this way.

…so why will we use smart meters?

It’s the same misguided extrapolation which concluded that, because people like web surfing and watching TV, they will obviously want to do both on the same device. Yes, smart meters might allow me to know exactly how much energy my electric toothbrush consumes from minute to minute but do I really care – and what exactly am I meant to do with the information?

Google even thinks we are going to be so entranced by this information that we’ll be checking it on our mobile phones. “By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption, for instance, via their computers, phones or other devices, we can unleash the forces of innovation in homes and businesses,” the company’s letter to Obama states.

Obviously, anything that puts pressure on utility companies to curb their shameful pricing practices is a good thing. But raw data won’t do it. We need something more intuitive – say automatic alerts if energy usage crosses a certain cost threshold. Without that, any benefit will be lost.

Instead of being empowered by data, smart grids and meters will drown us in the stuff. Instead of asserting control by witholding information, utility companies can take the opposite tack: they can fire out so much, it will become meaningless. Well you asked for it, they will say, and now you are getting it.

Some people are working on smart meter interfaces which are actually useful, but the power industry has been accused of trying to subvert the process. Smart meters will only be useful if they are genuinely smart – and are delivered in a smart way.