The United Kingdom's National Audit Office is predicting that the cost of delivering smart meters to 50 million British homes by 2020 will be considerably higher than the government projects and that it will be harder than expected to induce the desired changes in consumer behavior.
"For the money spent to provide value, we all have to change the way we behave. It is not clear how the department will stimulate this behavior change. And as technology changes, the department will have to be properly flexible to respond with up-to-date technology for the smart meters. These uncertainties can drive up costs more than planned," commented Margaret Hopf, a member of Parliament who chairs the parliamentary Committee of Public Accounts.
Separately, British citizens were also found to be broadly skeptical about smart metering costs and benefits, according to a survey conducted by The Economist magazine for the technology provider T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom that has offices in California and India.
The promise of smart metering is that it will help utilities make the grid more reliable and help customers save electricity and money. Hence the multiplicity of new products being offered by major suppliers like Landis+Gyr [photo above]. Yet adverse reactions to smart metering have turned out to be surprisingly widespread in terms of both geography and concerns. For example: The Dutch have worried about home security as utilities gather more detailed information on domestic energy use, Californians about radiation from wireless communications devices in meters, and Texans about unexpected increases in electricity bills.
Inasmuch as smart metering is but the first phase of global efforts to integrate advanced computing and communications into traditional power grids, the broad pushback it's encountered indicates that the smart grid may have a tough row to hoe.
