Texas Smart Meters Are Accurate
You may have been riveted this week by news out of Canada that inaccurate meters are costing 150,000 Canadians pennies per month, but you might have missed the recent report by Navigant Consulting on the Texas smart meter brouhaha.
(Please read tomorrow's column: Canadian smart meters are, in fact, working fine.)
Complaints about too-high electric bills reached a crescendo this past spring, when citizens in the Oncor, AEP Texas and CenterPoint service territories demanded a moratorium on smart meter installation. The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) declined to stop smart meter rollouts, but ordered an independent review of the meters' accuracy and related matters.
The study, issued July 30, found that smart meters by different vendors, both installed and not-yet-installed, are 99.96 percent accurate. The data and billing support systems work. Instead, last winter, cold by Texas standards, caused higher bills that led to smart meter complaints, the study concluded.
That gave Oncor, AEP Texas and CenterPoint some relief and vendors such as Itron and Landis+Gyr an opportunity to trumpet the news and reiterate their deployment milestones. Out of nearly 1.5 million meters installed across the three utilities, the study identified a little over 1,000 complaints, or 1/15th of one percent.
The upshot: the technology works. The downer: a small number of people can make an inordinately loud stink.
There's a possibility that a few bills jumped when older, slower meters were replaced with accurate ones—and that possibility, apparently, is being explored. Otherwise, this phenomenon now awaits sociological and anthropological analysis. I'd posit that a legacy of mistrust of one's utility, the recession, a lack of utility communication or customer attention and, yes, the weather, are factors.
Readers weigh in, please.
That leaves California awaiting the results of an independent study of smart meter accuracy, after vociferous complaints put Bakersfield and Fresno back on the national map. Currently, a slew of Marin County towns have passed their own moratoriums on further smart meter deployment, claiming the meters' electro-magnetic radiation is harmful to human health.
(Few believe that Marin County citizens are overlooking their cell phones and Wi-Fi routers to demonize smart meters on health grounds; rather, my conversations point to score settling with Pacific Gas & Electric.)
The Marin pushback of past weeks led Pacific Gas & Electric CEO Peter Darbee last week to quote Intelligent Utility Daily's Kate Rowland to the California Public Utility Commission on the numerous federal agencies that have certified that smart meters' electro-magnetic radiation is at a safe level.
Returning to Texas, a quick review of the study results should provide readers with enough information that they can weigh in on what the pushback in Texas is all about.
Oncor had installed more than one million Landis+Gyr's Focus AXR-SD meters by the end of June and expects to deploy 3.4 million smart meters by the end of 2012. CenterPoint had installed more than 450,000 Itron Centron smart meters and expects to install more than two million meters in the Houston metropolitan area by mid-2012. AEP Texas also installs the Landis+Gyr Focus AXR-SD meters, deploying more than 14,000 by the end of June in a rollout of 1.1 million by 2013.
Navigant Consulting was retained to answer four questions about these smart meters:
- Do they accurately measure and record electricity usage?
- Do they accurately communicate usage data through to the billing system?
- Is recorded usage higher among customers with smart meters than those with electromechanical meters?
- Do other factors cause the high number of complaints about smart metered bills?
Navigant oversaw independent tests of 5,627 meters; 2,706 already deployed and 2,400 yet-to-be-deployed. All but two, or 99.96 percent, met accuracy levels mandated by the PUCT.
Side-by-side tests of smart meters and electromechanical meters found that the former "consistently performed better" than the latter.
Interestingly, a historical accuracy test of 86,756 electromechanical meters found that 4 percent failed to meet standards set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and 25 percent failed to meet performance criteria for smart meters set by the three utilities. (Some electromechanical meters slow down over time and, with a smart meter installed, the transition could be surprising.)
Analysis of electricity usage by customers with smart meters and those with the old, electromechanical meters, however, found no significant difference.
"The vast majority of the higher electricity bills [was] due primarily to ... the recent severe winter in Texas," the report stated. Some exceptions stemmed from estimated versus manual meter reads.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
Comments
We have a winner...
Here we have what I hope is the first of several entries seeking to identify the mysterious "anatomy of a brouhaha" to explain smart meter pushback in Texas.
Honestly, let's say that higher bills were the proximal cause, but in some cases complainants had not had smart meters installed when they cried foul. We're operating on the theory that other elements are at work.
Our correspondent here suggests "ADS," anticipatory discomfort syndrome.
I'm all ears.
Regards, Phil Carson
Consumer Concerns
In 15 years of installing energy management systems, a lesson learned over and over is that consumers suffer from Anticipatory Discomfort Syndrome (ADS). Anything that happens to anything using electricity, as soon as the decision is made to use DSM, suddenly is assumed to be a direct result of that decision. A random wall outlet or lamp failure obviously was caused by the installation of the energy management system. We had complaints about the impact on comfort only to discover that the customer's system had not been installed yet. ADS remains in play for 6 to 12 months for each customer but then disappears. Bottom line: utilities should anticipate this themselves and do a better job of education about what the new meters do and do not do, the high level of testing already done to assure their accuracy and, in the unlikely event of a problem, who to contact. Make it easy and fast for the consumer to get to someone knowledgeable. It will blow over. Regulators also need to be aware of ADS.
microcontrollers in product
Now we have the Smart Grid, and smart meters, for gas and electricity. In California, PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric, also known as Pigs, Greed & Extortion) has connected up to 3.3 million “smart meters,” which are presumably helping people save energy and money. In fact, 99.8% of these meters work fine. Just one leetle problem—more than 5400 customers have had terrible problems with bad meters. They read either much too high or too low.
Whichever is the problem, PG&E sends out an estimated bill. Some of these bills are so absurd, the customers are enraged. PG&E apparently did not have any good plans to talk thoughtfully to customers, not any better than AT&T had. So gangs of outraged customers are protesting and marching on PG&E, equipped with pitchforks and torches.* Wouldn’t you be grouchy if you went on a month of vacation and came home to find a $236 bill for electricity, even though you’d turned out all the lights?
Did PG&E have no plans for the possibility that some meters might err? Who designed the meters? Who built the meters? Who ran the quality control on the meters? Who evaluated the meters after they were installed? Who planned the customer relations? Not me! Did these guys all assume that the “smart meters” had to work right because they were all-digital?
Do you trust the people who designed and put out these “smart meters” to run a complete “smart” power grid? I can’t answer any questions. But I am qualified to ask questions.
I just hope that somebody has set up some stronger, smarter firewalls to keep foreign hackers from going in and mis-programming the grid’s computers to wreck all the generators and transformers. If the Department of Defense isn’t smart enough to keep all the hackers out, who is? I hope somebody is.
Will we have enough electricity to charge up all the new electric cars and plug-in hybrids at night? You can manage some parts of a shortage, and you can make incentives for people to postpone their charging. But a real shortage is a real shortage. Pretending doesn’t fix that.
Since that’s the limit of my wisdom on that topic, I’ll shut up and sit down.
http://electronicdesign.com/article/analog-and-mixed-signal/what_s_all_this_smart_grid_stuff_anyhow.aspx
You don't know what a device containing a microcontroller is really doing.