Smart Meters, Power Cuts, Soon To Be The ‘New Normal’ In The UK
Last week, the Chief Executive of Centrica/British Gas; Chris O’Shea, caused outrage when he told a House of Commons committee that so-called ‘smart meters’ should be compulsory
But anyone surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention.
The ‘smart grid’ has always required that all domestic and business consumers are fitted with smart meters, and compulsion is the only way that energy companies can manage the scarcity created by the U.K.’s aggressive climate policy agenda.
It doesn’t matter how much this policy agenda is wrapped up in fluffy PR, it transforms the relationships between individuals, energy companies and the state.
According to the Times, O’Shea told MPs:
We think that in order to have the proper smart grid that’s required to keep costs low in the future, everybody should have a smart meter. …
One of the things we should consider as to whether this is a voluntary programme, or whether it should be mandatory. …
If you mandated it, then we could have that programme completed within the next five years.
Other energy retail bosses have said the same thing in the recent past.
Like many of the daftest climate and energy policies, the smart meter rollout was first devised in 2009 by Ed Miliband. Back then, the Government believed that 50 million smart meters would have been installed by 2019, but they didn’t start being rolled out until 2013.
Meanwhile, energy company bosses were candid about the reality behind promised upsides of the green agenda. In 2011, National Grid Chief Executive Steve Holliday told BBC Today :
The grid’s going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030. We keep thinking about: we want it to be there and provide power when we need it.
It’s going to be a much smarter system, then. We’re going to have to change our own behaviour and consume it when it’s available, and available cheaply.
In 2013, a National Grid Director, Chris Train, caused controversy by appearing to suggest that electricity use is a ‘luxury’.
The problem that smart meters and the smart grid were always intended to solve was the fact that ‘renewable’ sources such as wind and solar only provide intermittent energy. Whereas fuels like coal and gas can be stored and burned as required by power stations, neither the Sun nor the wind responds to human needs and wants.
So our increasing dependence on these sources via the smart grid requires something to regulate our demand – to encourage our use of power when it is available, and to discourage it when it’s not. That mechanism is, of course, price.
The smart meter, then, would encourage rationing through ‘dynamic pricing’. Furthermore, energy companies have lobbied for legislation that allows them to balance supply and demand by switching off appliances – and even supply – remotely.
Hence National Grid senior staffers explaining that vast investments are required to achieve the U.K.’s emissions-reduction targets, and that the way we use energy will have to change radically.
Not surprisingly, take-up of smart meters has been far slower than governments have hoped. Nobody wants a device in their home whose only function will be to enable an energy company to charge them five quid for a shower before work.
Yet to avoid public pushback, ministers since Miliband have falsely claimed that smart meters will help households ‘reduce bills’ and put the onus on energy retailers to implement the rollout – if they don’t show sufficient effort in enforcement of the Government’s policy, they can then be fined.
Thus, the public standing of energy companies has diminished over the duration, fuelling a growing antagonism between customers and retailers, as smart meters and other policies, such as the destruction of coal-fired power stations, have caused power prices to triple since the early 2000s.
Energy companies take much of the blame for Westminster’s policy failures.
Don’t misunderstand the point. This is not a defence of energy companies. Of course, companies like National Grid have their greedy eyes on the opportunities created for them by ‘green’ dirigisme.
But only a fool would expect them not to. And one thing that there is no scarcity of is fools in SW1A. Energy companies have been relatively candid, if one cares to look, whereas Energy and Environment Ministers, from Gummer, Yeo, and Huhne, to more ideological zombies such as Miliband and Davey, have promised that climate targets can be hit with no downsides.
But whereas the targets are binding in law, the upsides they promise are not. Anyway, rationing is good for you, donchaknow?
Even as Ed Miliband was preparing his speeches to promise ‘lower bills’ back in 2009, his own office, the now defunct Deptartment of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), produced an analysis that, according to the Daily Mail, showed smart meters would produce “annual savings of just £28 a year off a typical annual duel fuel bill by 2020, meaning it will take around 12 years just to recoup the initial installation costs”.
Not so, replied DECC officials, “if people were more proactive in using the meters they could actually slash around £100 a year off their bills”. Between 2009 and 2020, however, domestic electricity prices rose by over 30 percent in real terms, having already risen by a third since the turn of the century.
Westminster’s climate ambitions, epitomised by Ed Miliband, don’t even give us the option of running to stand still. Even less does Miliband’s characteristic dogma and intransigence allow debate and democracy to represent our views.
Legal force was always going to be required to put smart meters into the homes of people who did not want them, and who recognise that such devices are not capable of serving their interests.
And that antagonism was necessarily going to require a transformation of the relationship between consumers and energy companies.
Henceforth, the latter would require unprecedented statutory powers, including a suspension of the requirement to supply reliable power to customers, who would be paying ever more for an ever-diminishing level of service, while energy company profits were underwritten by the Government.
And that is made necessary by the fact that the wind is not always blowing, and today’s generation of politicians are no more capable of responding to reality and the public interest than a wind turbine can move without wind.
There is therefore nothing surprising about Chris O’Shea’s remarks.
See more here dailysceptic.org
Header image: Gulf Daily News
Bold emphasis added
Editor’s note: the bottom line of all this is that Brits should soon expect permanent power cuts.
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“that allows them to balance supply and demand by switching off appliances – and even supply – remotely.”
Just to be clear, while a remote shutdown of supply is a big concern, your appliances can not be affected remotely unless they are equipped to do so. Silly named ‘smart devices’ are the likely culprits, but any appliance with the required capability is a valid target.
Be aware, that a supplier can use the existence of meter communication networks to attempt a lie by advising you they have accessed your meter, for example to reset it, when in fact they are unable to do so. It happened to me. Complain.
My current supplier sends me a statement based on ‘reports from my meter’. This is not possible because my meter is standalone, so I contacted them over it, simultaneously informing them I will never accept a smart meter despite the continuous tries. They gave up.
Add the fact that should the network be attacked, mass supply shutdowns are possible.
There’s allways hacks and jamming methods for the adventurous…
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Terry Shipman
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A couple of years ago Entergy, here in Arkansas, replaced the old dumb meters with smart meters that eliminated the need for a meter reader to walk up to the meter to read it. Yesterday a storm brought down a tree limb and took out my power drop. I called Entergy and they dispatched a repairman. As he was working he told me that these new meters had a feature that would automatically notify the power company if power was lost. He said they had to disable the feature because they were getting too many false reports. I told him I thought it was a good idea. That would be an improvement that would benefit the customer. I don’t mind changes like that.
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Carbon Bigfoot
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Terry you would rather bathe you and your family with the microwave poison of RF/EMF from these devices. Nor are you considering the following:
In my state of Pennsylvania the constitutional rights, as well as the most fundamental of human rights, of every Pennsylvanian are being systematically and ruthlessly trampled by an arrogant, out-of-control agency of the PA administrative state.
The matter of particular concern here is the forced installation, with no opt-out, of radiofrequency radiation-producing, wireless ‘smart meter’ devices by the PA Public Utility Commission and the state’s electric utility companies (EDCs — electric distribution companies).
The assault by this alliance of government and industry on the rights of Pennsylvanians extends well beyond the increased risks to human health and public safety. Pennsylvania’s citizens are being deprived even of the right to protect themselves from possible physical harm or the threat of harm posed by these wireless devices. Property rights and privacy rights also are being violated with impunity.
In blatant violation of customers’ property rights, the electric utility companies, pursuant to the PAPUC’s policy of mandating the installation of smart meters, are furthering their commercial business interests by forcibly using customers’ homes and properties with these devices for purposes other than the collection of electricity usage data from those properties. More specifically, the Commission’s policy in effect requires that electric utility companies take, or seize, a property interest in customers’ homes to site their wireless smart meters and use them as ‘relay points’ to receive and re-transmit data that does NOT originate from those customers’ properties. Without customers’ informed consent, the electric utility companies, acting with the imprimatur of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, thus have been given an extra or augmented level of commercial usage of customers’ homes and properties to which these companies are not lawfully entitled.
Still think its a good idea Terry—-get informed. https://pasafetech.org › research.
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Terry Shipman
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I’m not bothered by those things that benefit me. I have blue tooth hearing aid devices, cell phone always at my side and EMF from modern communications system. It’s an inescapable part of modern life. We can’t get away from it without going back in time to a time before radio was invented.
I’m not bothered by the fact that the power and gas companies here can read meters remotely. I only wish that automatic notification of power failure hasn’t worked correctly for Entergy. I like that idea.
The whole concern is whether or not improvements work for us or for the government. For us or against us. We have to be discerning and not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Several months ago my audiologist sold me a small remote microphone that I can place in the middle of the table at Bible study and it picks up people’s voice around the table and wirelessly sends the audio to my hearing aid. I can hear them so much better with it. For years now I have a lanyard around my neck that has a button that lets me answer a cell phone call and it feeds the audio to my hearing aid. That’s very handy while driving.
I spent 37 years working for Southwestern Bell-AT&T and saw many changes. Some good and some bad. I saw the company go from the vacuum tube era to the fiber optic era. The idea is, as Scripture puts it, to choose the good and refuse the evil.
Anything, including technology, can be used for evil. In the meantime, if Entergy can get the automatic notification of power failure to work, I’m all for it.
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