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Smart Meters Look Dumb For The Users. (Read 288 times)
imcrookonit
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Smart Meters Look Dumb For The Users.
Oct 17th, 2010 at 3:33pm
 




SMART meters, the new technology pushing up Victorian power bills, will provide little benefit to customers over the next five years, as the big electricity companies reap hundreds of millions of dollars from the rollout, a Sunday Age investigation has revealed.

Findings by the Australian Energy Regulator have undermined the state government's position on smart meters - which will be fitted to every Victorian home by the end of 2013 - and the most recent cost-benefit analysis shows the implementation will deliver $1.5 billion in cost savings to power companies over 20 years and few real benefits to customers.

This comes as Victorians face escalating bills driven by smart meters. Customers pay up front, regardless of whether they have a smart meter. This year the cost was $68, next year $72, and the Auditor-General warned that costs could climb higher.

Power companies will recover the cost of installing and operating meters through bills until 2028. So far, 250,000 meters have been installed.

Smart meters replace the old ''spinning disk'', manually read meters measuring electricity use. The new meters have two-way remote communication with the power company, sending energy use data 48 times a day. They will be able to connect and disconnect homes with the touch of a button. Retiring energy minister Peter Batchelor says the $1.6 billion rollout is like going from ''telegrams to email''.

Even the government's critics support the concept of smart meters but worry that, in leading the nation, Victoria has gone too far, too fast. The program, dubbed by the opposition as the ''myki of metering'', has doubled in price.

When it committed to a universal implementation, the Brumby government promised the meters would help ''tackle climate change'' and allow householders to manage energy and reduce power costs.

The customer benefits, however, now appear shaky. The meters tell customers virtually nothing about their energy use. Households need an ''in-home display'' or web-based program to see energy use and power charges. There is no plan about who - the retailer or the householder - pays for this technology in the program's next stage.

The government has also put a moratorium on a big benefit of smart meters: time-of-use tariffs. These allow people to shift energy use to cheaper times of the day.

The tariffs have been put on hold, possibly until the end of 2011, after the government accepted it had not considered disadvantaged groups and stay-at-home families who cannot easily shift power use and could be penalised by up to $200 a year.

But even when the moratorium is lifted, it is unclear whether Victorians would change their behaviour, therefore cutting power costs and reducing stress on the system at peak times, according to a recent finding by the Australian Energy Regulator.

In its draft decision released earlier this year, the regulator, which sets energy prices for Victorians, assessed power companies' claims about the impact of smart meters on peak demand and overall energy use. The regulator dismissed the interstate and overseas studies relied on by the distributors - which have underpinned the government's economic case for smart meters - and said they were likely to be overstating the expected reductions in energy consumption.

Added to this, the regulator said, were the ''uncertainties'' around the smart-meter installation and time-of-use tariffs. It was reasonable ''to assume that there will be no material impact on maximum demand and energy consumption [until 2015]''.

Politically, the government is exposed on smart meters because it has little control over how they will affect power bills. The government changed the regulations to allow power companies to charge customers for smart meters. But it is up to the independent regulator to identify and pass on the $1.5 billion of expected savings the power companies will reap from smart meters. These savings include $298 million over 20 years by getting rid of meter readers and $364 million in no longer paying workers to connect homes.

But some are sceptical about the regulator passing on the savings to customers. St Vincent de Paul policy and research manager Gavin Dufty said of the smart meter program: ''It just doesn't add up for households.''

Mr Batchelor, who has overseen the program since 2006, said he was confident the regulator would be vigilant in recouping savings for consumers. He said Citipower's reconnection fee of $26.20 would drop to zero for customers with smart meters. ''These are tangible, real benefits that are being passed on to people now.''

Opposition energy spokesman Michael O'Brien said the Coalition had no confidence in the government's last cost-benefit analysis and would assess the project to see if some consumer benefit could be salvaged. ''This program doesn't do what it was supposed to do economically or environmentally for Victorians and the big power distribution companies are laughing all the way to the bank,'' he said.

The government's most recent analysis showed that the $1.6 billion implementation would bring $1.8 billion of benefits. But the real benefits came under the the next phase of the program, which requires more investment in technology, more regulation and more customer behaviour change. The cost would be $1.8 billion and the benefits $2.5-$5 billion, the report said.
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freediver
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Re: Smart Meters Look Dumb For The Users.
Reply #1 - Oct 17th, 2010 at 6:57pm
 
It does seem odd that we still have to pay people to check meters. One place I used to live they didn't read the meter for years, even though it was easily accessible. We kept getting notices telling us they couldn't access it, so they just guessed the bill.
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Re: Smart Meters Look Dumb For The Users.
Reply #2 - Oct 18th, 2010 at 7:01pm
 
This is the same Peter Batchelor that protested against giving Victorians a gross feedin tariff now he wants to tell us that if we fork out bucks for a dumb meter then we all will magically save lots of money. Yeh right Sad

Also those dumb meters won't register power being fed back into the grid unless it has been switched on by the authorities. Big brother and the energy monopoly is still live and kicking Sad
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In August 2021, Newcastle Coroner Karen Dilks recorded that Lisa Shaw had died “due to complications of an AstraZeneca COVID vaccination”.
 
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