A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them.
So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business.
Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.
There are plenty of rational reasons for not wanting a smart meter. Don't let the irrational people detract from the fact that there are many real problems with smart meters. Especially lots of privacy issues.
In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from the money lost from chasing up issues where people are trying to cheat the system.
In this example it really makes me wonder if replacing all the meters in the country with non-intercompatible smart meters really saves that much money. So you have to start asking what else is in there for them to do this. Probably money for the data I would have to imagine.
Also, given how absolutely atrociously shite the security of these smart meters is (and you'll have to trust me on this, I don't know how public this information is) I wouldn't want that crap anywhere near my house in the eventuality that someone hijacks it to make it look like I'm using more electricity when they're using less (while keeping the overall books balanced so to speak) or some other nefarious purpose.
Certainly these meters won't give you 5G cancer, but they're really a horrible idea as they stand and I don't recommend anyone install them, at least not in the UK.
Sure, but those not-irrational reasons are locale-specific. I've never heard of someone self-reporting the meter reading here in the US. The meter still keeps a local log of how much energy was used, so worrying about being framed for using too much energy still feels a bit irrational to me.
OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates, which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning such sales, not banning smart meters.
If a smart meter gets hacked it's not unreasonable to imagine the local logs are compromised. This is a bit like all the arguments against voting machines but in a less concerning setting.
TOU rates are a thing you can get with pre-programmed meters. They may not benefit the utility company as much as tailored rates but they probably have 90% of the benefit while having 0% of the privacy implications.
The companies don't even have to sell the data, they can just mine it for information, such as which rate to automatically put you on once your contract finishes to make the most money out of you etc.
I just don't want the timing of my electricity consumption to end up being used as evidence against me for growing cannabis. Feels pretty rational from my perspective.
In Australia, in the state of Victoria all meters are smart meter for few years now. They are also growing in number in other states. There has been no hacking incident. in fact it makes peoples life easier by allowing them to track energy usage at every 15 mins interval with historical data using an app from the utility company. This data cannot be sold either. In fact under the Govt. Open API scheme very shortly you will be able to give access to your own data for comparison to select the best plan for you (just like open banking).
So sounds like Australian smart meter companies are better at security than British ones.
The energy usage tracking can be done without smart meters, in this country electricity companies (and lots of private companies) offered induction clamp based electrical usage logging devices. These may not have been quite as accurate as onboard measuring but this could have easily been solved with some kind of serial protocol exposed on the meter which a third party datalogger could attach to. The ability to track energy usage is not a feature of a smart meter, it's just a feature of having access to the meter's data, this data could always have been made available even if the meter wasn't networked.
Open banking is a complete disaster that I seriously don't think deserves the name "open". I still don't understand how an API which requires you to be a BANK to be able to interact with can remotely claim to be open but having tested some of the implementation for banks it's some horrific over-engineered mess.
Let's hope the data access API for your meter doesn't require you to be an electricity company to access it. As it stands, in the UK, meters are not intercompatible between utility companies so if you switch providers (which I do annually) the old smart meter just becomes a dumb meter again.
Arch-TK I absolutely agree with everything you are saying, and I don’t intend to get a smart meter myself for as long as possible.
However, you are incorrect that meters are incompatible between utility companies. You are right that SMETS1 meters _are_ incompatible. However, all new meter installations are SMETS2 and these are fully compatible between energy companies.
SMETS2 has been the standard for a number of years now. There are still old SMETS1 installations still active though.
I'd like to point out that ever since SMETS2 new (and some firmware updated) smart meters are compatible in the UK, although I do acknowledge they didn't used to be.
The big benefit imo is the load smoothing; statewide, power is cheaper and cleaner than it would otherwise have been.
Right now it’s factories and a few early adopters like me, but anyone can sign up for it and it’s substantially cheaper assuming you don’t mind turning things off at peak times.
Power consumption correlated with commercial breaks tells you what show somebody is watching. Power consumption correlated with 9-5 tells you if somebody is working from home. Power consumption correlated with a specific time in the morning tells you when somebody wakes up and subsequently turns the heat on. Lower power consumption over several days tells you when somebody is on vacation.
Are these relatively minor invasions of privacy compared to what advertising companies perform? Yes. But that's no reason to pretend that they aren't privacy-hostile moves on their own.
Yes, they absolutely can. Like with any surveillance technology, there are things you can do to obfuscate your patterns, but that doesn't mean that a broad rollout of the technology won't have a negative privacy impact on most customers.
It’s not obfuscation, if you are concerned about privacy. You can completely hide your usage patterns with a battery or solar/wind generation.
Are you honesty making the point that: knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto your property and read a number, as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).
> knowing you used 5 units of power in 1 month (where someone has to walk onto your property and read a number, as is the case in most dumb metered scenarios) is less of a privacy concern than knowing you used .3 of unit of power in the last 15 minutes (without needing to walk onto your property).
Personally, I think so for most people. But that depends on how much privacy your property provides from pedestrians and where your meter is located.
However, that is orthogonal to the debate since there are other options. Some places allow self reporting and Automated Meter Reading can be done without a smart meter that reports live power usage.
I am unsure why you are so vested in arguing that nobody has a legitimate reason to be concerned about this. It is fine if it doesn't bother you, but it is really necessary to paint those with different concerns as irrational?
> no, it’s always worth pointing out irrational reasoning though.
You haven't done that though. You've made accusations of irrationality without ever once backing them up.
> So far I’ve only heard made up, theoretical, what if, privacy concerns.
I think engineers have am ethical duty to consider "theoretical" privacy concerns when they are working on new technology.
Given the history of data mining and brokerage in the US, I would be willing to make significant bets that, (in the absence of a new law being passed to prohibit it,) consumer power usage patterns from smart meters will be sold to data brokers. Pretending this isn't going to happen belies either your knowledge of the existing markets for data or your own rationality.
Irrational premise: smart meters have privacy concerns over normal meters.
Me: how so, there is way too much noise (generation and storage) to get signal (usage correlation). In real life smart meters allow for all sorts of benefits/innovation (time of use charges, time off user feed in)
You: you haven’t said anything, just wild accusations of irrationality. Privacy is a concern, data harvesting!!! Pretending this isn’t going to happen is crazy.
Wtf? Smart meters exist, and this hasn’t happened. Show me one instance. Time of use charges are a thing, look them up. Using electrical usage data to gather private information is not a thing. Look that up too.
It is a matter of degree, but that degree is not small. Anytime you decrease the interval, you need to justify the commensurate loss of privacy. You can't just handwave away these concerns like posters in this thread are doing.
A rough inference of which months might involve vacations (data about which is probably already being sold from other sources) is far less invasive than a daily record of your sleep cycle.
With the lack of privacy laws in the US, it is pretty much a given that this data will be sold as soon as the private utility companies in the US start collecting it.
You can also bill users for peak usage times when electricity is expensive or requires falling back on non-renewable resources for production with hourly data.
When it comes to smart meter security and privacy (and perhaps in this day and age diversity and equity) concerns let's discuss them when there's an evidence that they have caused problems.
There's not that many things about the smart meter that are much worse than the vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning disk meter. There were many problems with old meters too. And the benefits far outweigh those issues. Smart meters are not being hacked left and right.
And your privacy concerns are just a matter of granularity of time. You report your usage monthly -- that is also private information. Smart meters just do it on a finer timescale. Not a fundamental difference.
The vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning disk meter may have been bad but they couldn't be exploited remotely from someone else's house.
Yes, granularity of the measurements IS a problem. If these things only reported the readings when I pressed a button, I would not be so concerned about privacy (that is if the companies could prove to me that the meters did not report the readings outside of these times).
I don't think your argument supports the second conclusion in your penultimate sentence. Seems like a big leap. Power and water “just work” and the utility companies can’t abuse people. As an “end user” I don't get crappier power or worse water because my neighbor is spooked out by smart meters. I highly doubt the savings would be passed on to me anyway. I would 1000 times over rather live in a world where internet utility service providers were required to substantiate service terminations the details of which are governed by civil law not by an abusive EULA written to protect tue company not the user. If it means email costs $1/month so be it. I pay for email on principle anyway.
Then isn't this an argument that tech companies are not utilities because the things they supply don't "just work" and have no nuance to them?
Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market.
Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a right to not have complex terms of usage?
You want the best of both worlds. Maybe that's not possible.
Bullshit. Delivering power and water are incredibly complex. Water has to be sourced from God knows where, you have to do planning on building reservoirs. You have to manage run off (hey, your horses can't keep shitting near that stream!). You have to treat the water and manage it's acidity. You have to keep mains running. If a leak springs and the system goes under pressure, the whole supply can become contaminated! So now you have to notify your users that they need to BOIL THEIR WATER! you have to detect leaks in the last mile of delivery so that you can protect the system. You have to keep your pumps from getting flooded. You have to manage subsidy programs and different user classes. You have to integrate with federal and state water authorities.
Utilities are complicated. There's no such thing as delivering and not failing to deliver.
> People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters.
Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it.
This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.
Not only the electric company, anyone with a hint of ambition. I can read my own meter, along with 60 of my closest neighbors if I so chose (I don't) because every meter emits unencrypted packets several times for each reporting interval (5 minutes in my case)
How do you defend against the argument that it's just a matter of degree?
I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal information. Why is a smart meter so different?
Why would you assume that increasing the effect of something by orders of magnitude is harmless? Chugging 1 glass of water is great, but 100 will kill you; the only difference is a matter of degree.
A spinning meter can be manually checked to find out if someone is on vacation, but doing that is slow and isn't very worthwhile for criminals. Being able to monitor 100,000 meters at once for empty homes might suddenly be very economical for criminals.
One is connected to the internet and sends data every second of the day (hopefully only to authorized recipients) while the other provides only one monthly datapoint and is quite a pain for bad actors, or anyone really, to collect. It’s like the difference between showing someone you have $X in your checking account vs showing someone all of the transactions you’ve conducted in the account over the last month. One is far more invasive because it’s a window into your daily habits.
You cannot tell from your old meter because it does not submit meter readings every minute (or whatever the configuration is) because it does not have an internet connection.
Usage patterns seem extremely important for building out a renewable power grid. Meanwhile, what is the privacy concern with the “shape” of your usage?
A change in your usage pattern could be used to ID any number of private things that could then be used against you:
- When you’ve gone on vacation and your home is unattended.
- When you have an additional tenant, a long-term houseguest, have a new significant other or even have a baby.
- Whether or not you’re actually working when you’re working from home.
- Homes that use greater than X amount of electricity are at greater risk of Y and so your home owners/rental/car insurance premium goes up.
- People who play computer/video games late at night are at higher risk for health issues is your health insurance premium goes up.
And I bet there are other, much more subtle things they could figure out once given the opportunity to vacuum up your data: like estimate what temperature you set your AC to and determine whether or not someone in the house was awake at any given moment of any given day.
I am not sure why I ( or you for that matter ) am forced to defend my stance on privacy by listing things I want to stay private. The objection is that I do not want to have my every move monitored with ever-increasing accuracy.
This seems to be an annoying issue. Any serious proponent of privacy is already taking steps to hold on its vestiges, which include not taking a public stance on it.
At my house, I have a meter that I get a feed from. So I look at the graphs. From the graphs, you can learn about what is happening in the house. You know when someone is showering, left home for work (arrived home), doing laundry, went to bed/got up, used the microwave and so on. Some of that you could determine by watching the house, but that requires constant surveillance. A smart meter provides all this data with no effort and at mass scale. If I can glean that level of information just by glancing at the graphs, I'm sure someone better equipped could determine even finer grain details of what is going on in the house.
I am disabled and I was considering growing my own medicine in the event of losing job or not having funds for filling my prescription any more - hopefully that will never happen, but knowing that I have a smart meter, that would add a lot of anxiety that I don't need.
If the electric company sends someone out to read your meter every day is that objectionable? Every hour? Every minute? At what resolution is energy usage too invasive? Why?
Not just humans can misbehave, machines can also. I work in industrie automation and there is often the question should we produce just errormessages or should or machines produce a product. If you wanna catch ever error, every low or high temp, every whatever, no machine can even start to produce a product ever.
An Example for your Example. Yes i'm one of those people who tried to keep his old electricity meter the longest time possible. I have 36 solar panels installed on my roof and the old disk meter just rotated backwards when I was not using all that electricity during the day. The new meter, that i could only delay a year or 2, is electronic and does not give me anything when I push energy to the net all day. The government in my country can give you money for that energy but that would be the raw price without any tax and the energy you use later on the day still has tax on it so that does not really help, The tax is also 80 to 90% of the price.
So I hope that gives some perspective why people may prever to keep an old system around and not be forced by a big company to change it.
In the UK the government imposed a quota to the utility companies for smart meter installations. Hence they are desperate to boost adoption, recently they have drafted Albert Einstein into their all-out advertising campaign. The government is clearly anxious to push this change which is precisely why i'm not rushing.
Earnest question - Why does the utility have to honor the request of the owner? Doesn't the utility own the meter and is allowed to make changes to it as it sees fit?
The large utility in my state provides the meter, the customer provides the meter socket and everything downstream of the meter.
For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically), but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how it’s being metered.
one reason I've heard against smart meters is that it would make it easy for power companies to start charging non commercial users for apparent power rather than real power, as a way to indirectly raise prices.
because it's remotely updateable, and an analogue meter cannot measure apparent power (when the power returns to the grid the wheel would spin in the other direction)
Remote updating doesn't provide apparent power measurement, a power measurement chip does - this does require an upgraded meter, yes, but does not necessitate a smart one, although the economics of upgrading a fleet of meters probably dictates that they be smart meters for other reasons.
yes, but my point is that being remotely updateable means you can switch over to charging for apparent power remotely (which smart meters can already measure)
So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business.
Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.