The Oil Drum: Canada | How Smart is Ontario's Smart Metering Plan?

37 comments on How Smart is Ontario's Smart Metering Plan?

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nero on October 27, 2006 - 1:08pm

The problem is they have added all these extra features to make the units "smart". If instead they designed it as a "black-box recording device" that still had to be visited by a person to download the data it would be a trivial expense.

How much money are the utilities going to save by not having someone come to read the meter? The remote communication feature is probably the main cost factor driving the $400 price tag and is purely a cost saving feature for the utility. It has nothing to do with peak shaving.

In terms of hitting the poor and farmers particularly hard, they can always buy into a plan that gives them a fixed price. The smart meter gives them the option to have a variable price it doesn't make it a requirement. In Ontario there are already multiple providers of electricity that will give you the option of price certainty.

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Engineer-Poet on October 27, 2006 - 7:34pm

For all of the "smart" features, the manufacturer's brochure doesn't spend any time on interaction with loads. WiFi and Bluetooth interfaces, which interface easily with much consumer gear, are conspicuous... by their absence.

If consumers are going to be hit with higher rates at crisis times, they need to have access to that information in real time. Preferably, their appliances should be able to access and act on that data without human intervention. I see no features in this meter to allow this.

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marxmarv on October 28, 2006 - 2:37pm

But most consumer gear that sucks down power isn't WiFi- or Bluetooth-equipped, and making it so would add another $20 or more per unit. Antennas, precision timebase, fast microcontrollers, FCC/DOC certification,... Add the hassle and problems of configuring the meter and controlled loads to talk to one another. Then consider apartment buildings or the like where the meter is perhaps at the far end of the building from the loads, and these capabilities would likely go unused.

Ideally, you'd want a low-bandwidth channel over the electrical line itself. How about X10? A naïve installation could plug existing sheddable loads into appliance modules set to a well-known house/station code, and the meter would send the commands to turn those loads on and off at the appropriate times. In an intelligent installation, the meter might merely broadcast the information received from the utility and some other controller, perhaps even a home computer, would schedule and coordinate power use among smart appliances.

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Todd on October 28, 2006 - 8:21pm

Over the coming years, Pacific Gas and Electric is going to replace all its meters with remote read ones using the power lines. I have no idea what technology they are going to use or who will manufacture them.

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