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from the is-your-meter-smarter-than-a-5th-grader? dept.
Electricity companies increasingly install smart meters in order to stabilize the grid. The idea is simple: When there is high supply, the price goes down, while when there is little supply, prices go up. People therefore are more likely to wait for cheaper prices, thus the demand in low-supply times is reduced, and the demand in high-supply times is increased, resulting in a better match of supply and demand, and thus a more stable grid.
However now research at the University of Bremen shows that the smart meters may actually have the opposite effect. From the phys.org article:
"Our work examines the, at first sight, great idea to use smart electricity meters to dampen fluctuations in the electricity power nets," Stefan Bornholdt at the University of Bremen told Phys.org. "However, we find that under some conditions, consumers with such meters start competing and create a new artificial market which exhibits properties of real markets, such as bubbles and crashes. Thus, instead of dampening out fluctuations, it may create new ones. In this way, interacting smart meters may generate chaos instead of stability."
The mechanism they describe as follows:
"When laundry piles up, users (or algorithms in advanced machines) can adapt the threshold to a higher allowed price. When the fluctuating price then drops after a while from higher levels, those consumers who postponed their activity will then join the 'happy hour' of cheap electricity, leading to an avalanche of demand (reminding of some crowded bars at happy hour). This is a dynamic phenomenon which econophysics models, but not standard economic models, can represent."
The original article in Physical Review E is also freely available from arXiv.org.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:38PM
If the electronic meter doesn't send data to the consumer then i see no point in installing/getting one.
the old "turning wheel" meter is probably the universal pinnacle of simplicity for a A/C electrical metering device.
aliens might have different cars, houses even different diets, but sure as hell they have exactly the same spinning wheel electricity meter : )
yes, for the sake of future maintainability, keep-it-simple.
of course it sucks to visit a millions of meters every month to read the new values, but my guess is that 50%
of electronic meters don't communicate to the remote mother ship .. errr... home office at all but rather they
present a IR or such port that allows to quickly read the values with a handheld device instead of "by eye, paper and pen".
so the electronic meter needs to be physically visited anyways ...
methinks that 90% for smart meter installation is some shady under-the-table deal between electricity transport
company and "smart" meter manufacturer, you know the spinning-wheel meter works perfectly fine but let's enforce
a expensive version anyways ... i'll see you on the yacht later for a sundowner?
as for consumption monitoring, that electronics should be inside them transformers:
"smart" transformer provides data for electricity transport company.
electronic meter provides data to consumer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kromagv0 on Thursday July 30 2015, @02:34PM
Most of the new meters use some sort of NFC that they can read by a vehicle driving down the road, or that is at least what they installed in my neighborhood a couple years back. Now if only multiple things could be accomplished at once like an automated street condition survey, garbage collection, power and water meter reading that would be great. It isn't like the garbage and recycling trucks don't stop at almost every house every week and they are big enough that they probably house the additional hardware for these other functions without much issue.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Thursday July 30 2015, @09:07PM
They're a mesh network in my neck of the woods.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Alfred on Thursday July 30 2015, @05:42PM
Having worked for a place that designed and built powerplants and distribution isaw that they were all for the smart meter thing. They gave some stats on the number of meters and total bandwidth of data coming from them and it was like 30 kB per meter per day. WTF are you going to do with that much data? Even with per phase current and power factor, total cumulative consumption, network address and overhead, status bits and so on you are communicating all of that hundreds of times a day. Why?
The conspiracies about using this to monitor you and regulate you and spy on you are entirely possible. The tech is there and established. Like other utilities (phone) it is only a matter of time before it is used in nefarious invasive ways. You can easily leverage the EPA or environment causes to mandate extensive regulation or controls on individual power consumption to do it.