Lessons learnt on Smart Meter rollout

Just reading an interesting post on Greenmonks Blog http://greenmonk.net/pge-smart-meter-communication-failure/ on how not to roll out a smart meter system.

The crux of it is that if you want people to change their behavior, you have to make the information they need to adapt highly visible. In this rollout, the company was expecting customers to shift their loads from peak (high cost) periods to off peak (low cost) periods and thereby reduce their overall bills. But there were no displays on the meters giving the current cost of electricity, no way of seeing current consumption or current spend. I previously suggested in this blog, that to reduce our car driving we have the current cost of our journeys displayed in real-time on the car dashboard to keep reminding us how much we have spent. As it stands, we only have the short pain of filling up our tanks followed by a long period of driving for free, and judging from our steadfast reluctance to reducing the time we spend in our cars, fuel price increases don't lead to behaviour change.

Install Gas/Oil or use Night Rate for underfloor heating?My cold damp house is

My stone and earth, cold, damp house is heated by two wood (and occasionally a bit of coal) fired stoves. The wood has so far come from felling 40 year old Sitka spruce on the property and I have some willow and other copice trees growing. But unless I keep both fires going full pace all day, most of the house sticks at 5 degrees C through the winter. Miserable. I have underfloor heating installed, but rarely have enough hot water for it to make a difference and the cost of running the 12KW of immersions in the water tank is high.

Having been purist about using only wood for the first 7 winters, I gave in and started putting the odd bucket of coal in the stove and I have to say it makes a HUGE difference. Even one bucket of coal a day gives enough extra heat for the UFH to kick in a bit and at least one room is positively warm for most of the day. Having looked at the cost of installing more biomass solutions - a ceramic stove or gasification boiler, both costing over €10k, and the extra work and wood required, I've also had to consider gas or oil at an installation cost of only 2-3k.

But what I have been holding out for is real time pricing. The electricity companies buy from a pool supplied by the generators. When it's windy that price is low because wind companies can sell at whatever price they can get, their costs are the same if they sell or don't. If it's a still cold afternoon in winter, the price can be very high as extra gas fired power stations are fired up. So the electricity companies buy at variable prices and sell to us at fixed prices. I want to buy my electricity at a fixed premium above the pool price, so when it's windy I get cheap electricity and can turn on my UFH at a couple of cents and hour and when it's not, I put an extra few logs on the fire. You can read more about Real Time Pricing at Jerry Sweeney's blog at http://synergy.chipeservices.com/, it's coming but we need smart metering etc.........

So in the meantime, should I bow to pressure to get a programmable fossil fuel solution to my heat problem, get some heated fingerless gloves or use night rate electricity? I've experimented with turning on the immersions during the night - the UFH kicks in automatically when the water reaches a certain temperature. By using 60kw a night at a cost of €5.22, I can rise the temperature of the whole house from 5 to 10 degrees and the rooms with the stoves in maintain a toasty 12 degrees overnight. A huge difference in the quality of life of the inmates.

Here is the cost calculation:

Price of Night Rate Electric kw	8.7
Price of Gas per kw	4.8
Units per night	60
Cost per night electric	€5.22
Cost per night gas	€2.88
Gas saving/night	€2.34
Installation of Gas boiler/tank	2000
Worst case - 200 nights/year	180
Payback period years	4.7

Ignoring maintenance costs for the gas/oil boiler and assuming the ratio between electricity price and gas/oil price remains unchanged, 4.7 years before I'm saving by putting in another solution! And my bet is that electricity will become, relatively, cheaper as we increase the proportion of wind. And Once the real time pricing kicks in, I could be heating the house for €1 a night on renewables and helping to balance the load on the grid. Then I would be smug and snug!

Avoid the peak to reduce carbon emissions

Jerry Sweeney's website, Synergy Module, shows the current pricing for electricity on the Irish Grid. The graph above shows the graph for the 3rd Feb 2009. Remarkably consistant apart from the huge spike around 6pm. This is when peaking plant is turned on to provide the extra capacity required, and this peaking plant is not as efficient as generators for base load and so is both more expensive and emits more carbon per kilowatt. So if you want to reduce your carbon emissions, try to avoid using electricity at peak times. Run that washing machine at 4 in the morning, eat later! Once we get smart meters, we will have the option for smart machines to decide when it is cheapest for them to run. Until then we have to make the decisions for them.

Self-help gadget for electricity cost reduction

Some time in the future our equipment will negotiate for best price energy without our having to do anything. But in 2008, if we want to reduce our electricity bills we have to do it ourselves. Studies show that installing equipment to show people their current electricity usage has a big impact on their usage. For a short time. But when the novelty wears off we tend to slide back to our old habits. Here is an idea for a gadget to keep reminding us to use electricity efficiently.

Having done your initial measurement, you can tell a gadget your target electricity usage for the day. Once you reach this amount and alarm goes off and the gadget flashes an anoying red. Only 6pm and you've busted your limit again. Of course you will start to ignore this after a while as well, but maybe by then you might have got into the habit of switching the lights off or running the washing machine at night (so you don't hear that alarm going off!).