The case for smart meters
Energy companies are eager to see concrete plans about how the rollout of smart meters is going to work.
Chancellor Alistair Darling announced plans in last week’s budget to rollout smart meters to medium and large companies over the next five years, but there is still no clear scenario of how and when it is going to happen for the residential market.
The IT industry wants a clearer steer on what happens next.
“It seems that there is consensus that smart metering will happen and all that is required to kick start the mass roll-out is clarity from the government on the ‘how’ so that investment decisions can be made,” said Logica’s Rich Hampshire.
So we all think smart meters are a good idea. Russian energy giant Gazprom recently bought a stake in Truread, a UK smart metering group, and a survey by the Energy Retail Association found that 70 per cent of people think that access to real-time information about their energy consumption would help them cut down.
But until there is a proper legal framework to work with, the industry cannot attend to the wider implications of the rollout, and vendors are foreseeing potential problems already.
It was suggested to me last autumn that the networked nature of the smart meter infrastructure could pose security risks. If, for example, intruders managed to infiltrate the network, they would have access to data and could even interrupt power supplies.
But while none of this is meant to deflate the case for smart metering, it does illustrate how much there is to do. No one will be in a position to highlight and solve issues, and quash concerns, until there is a specification to work with. So these uncertainties should be a catalyst for developing a blueprint that will banish speculation and launch an effective infrastructure.