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Do home appliances and devices communicate with the power company via the smart meters? When I first heard about the smart meter there were fears that it would

by Ajay-p 3y ago

Do home appliances and devices communicate with the power company via the smart meters? When I first heard about the smart meter there were fears that it would allow the power company to see which appliances you were using, and charge you a different rate. For instance, an electric vehicle.

sauwan 3y ago
I consult in the industry, and certainly don't know everything, but everything that I've seen says that no, they don't. There are companies out there like Bidgely who claim they can do that to some extent, but they likely can only do that for really big loads unless your meters only powers a very few things.
- Ajay-p 3y ago
  That is a relief, thank you. It must have been a myth.
bluGill 3y ago
You want that if done with respect to privacy. Your electric car should not charge when rates are high. Your water heater should only turn on when the wind is blowing and there is a surplus of cheap power. (This requires extra hot water storage to make it through a day)
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  But the flow of information (for individual appliances) should be unidirectional from the supplier to the device, not the other way around.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    It needs to be two way as the power company is better able to coordinate the limited surplus with everyone else. I don't care if my water is heated at 10pm, midnight or 2am, I just want warm water for my shower when i get up.
    - mnw21cam 3y ago
      That still doesn't require bidirectional communication. The power company can assume that a collection of a reasonable number of households will have a fairly predictable power draw when presented with information from the power company, and this should allow the power company to balance the surplus without receiving data back from the households. There're two issues here. The first is coordination - a lot of people might say that all they want the power company to tell them is the spot price and then let them make their own decisions on when to use power, and that anything more (such as instructions to different households to do their heating at a certain time) takes away their autonomy/sovereignty. That could be something that we just accept as a price to pay for a stable power grid, but it's more than we have now and I can see possible pushback against it. The second issue is price fairness - in the absence of another coordination method, a power company could manage demand by giving a lower price to groups of households to trigger the demand in a subset of the grid, so not everyone gets the same price at the same time. But they would have to do that in a fair way, for instance by time-sharing that lower price around.
rcxdude 3y ago
No, the smart meters generally don't have this functionality. Other appliances can in theory hook into the market information from the supplier, but this isn't very common, and is generally under the user's control. The most common thing where users cede some control is home battery systems, where some providers give a discount or outright pay the users for control over using the batteries as grid storage ("virtual power plant"). But this is independent of the smart meter, a smart meter is mostly useful as someone with a home battery or EV because you can get acess to minute-by-minute energy pricing, whuch will generally save you money if you can shift your draw from the grid to when it's cheap. (I will say for the average consumer at the moment a smart meter only gives you a mild convenience increase, and is likely not worth the trouble. I haven't got one installed myself, despite and now in part because my energy provider has been hounding me to install one, due to this push from the government. There's no reason to be an early adopter for this if the benefits aren't good, given how badly scuffed the first iteration was)
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Honest question: not worth what trouble? Our utility just came and installed one of these, and they just left a card hanging on our doorknob saying so. We were totally uninvolved...
mikelward 3y ago
Octopus Energy were talking about being able to do this using machine learning given only real-time access only to the total power consumption. https://youtu.be/g-RQ0dOPTtc?t=474&si=r0zhDUr3OaMieHOz https://youtu.be/g-RQ0dOPTtc?t=474&si=r0zhDUr3OaMieHOz They offer things like discounted rates for charging electric vehicles. And are talking about being able to tell people when they're using more power than usual that they forgot to turn the oven off or they're using their dishwasher during peak or whatever. Edit: he mentioned Voltaware which seems to be this: https://voltaware.com/blog/2021-07-01/voltaware-octopus-insights https://voltaware.com/blog/2021-07-01/voltaware-octopus-insi...

by Ajay-p 3y ago

sauwan 3y ago

I consult in the industry, and certainly don't know everything, but everything that I've seen says that no, they don't. There are companies out there like Bidgely who claim they can do that to some extent, but they likely can only do that for really big loads unless your meters only powers a very few things.

Ajay-p 3y ago
That is a relief, thank you. It must have been a myth.

bluGill 3y ago

You want that if done with respect to privacy. Your electric car should not charge when rates are high. Your water heater should only turn on when the wind is blowing and there is a surplus of cheap power. (This requires extra hot water storage to make it through a day)

mnw21cam 3y ago
But the flow of information (for individual appliances) should be unidirectional from the supplier to the device, not the other way around.
- bluGill 3y ago
  It needs to be two way as the power company is better able to coordinate the limited surplus with everyone else. I don't care if my water is heated at 10pm, midnight or 2am, I just want warm water for my shower when i get up.
  - mnw21cam 3y ago
    That still doesn't require bidirectional communication. The power company can assume that a collection of a reasonable number of households will have a fairly predictable power draw when presented with information from the power company, and this should allow the power company to balance the surplus without receiving data back from the households. There're two issues here. The first is coordination - a lot of people might say that all they want the power company to tell them is the spot price and then let them make their own decisions on when to use power, and that anything more (such as instructions to different households to do their heating at a certain time) takes away their autonomy/sovereignty. That could be something that we just accept as a price to pay for a stable power grid, but it's more than we have now and I can see possible pushback against it. The second issue is price fairness - in the absence of another coordination method, a power company could manage demand by giving a lower price to groups of households to trigger the demand in a subset of the grid, so not everyone gets the same price at the same time. But they would have to do that in a fair way, for instance by time-sharing that lower price around.

rcxdude 3y ago

No, the smart meters generally don't have this functionality. Other appliances can in theory hook into the market information from the supplier, but this isn't very common, and is generally under the user's control. The most common thing where users cede some control is home battery systems, where some providers give a discount or outright pay the users for control over using the batteries as grid storage ("virtual power plant"). But this is independent of the smart meter, a smart meter is mostly useful as someone with a home battery or EV because you can get acess to minute-by-minute energy pricing, whuch will generally save you money if you can shift your draw from the grid to when it's cheap. (I will say for the average consumer at the moment a smart meter only gives you a mild convenience increase, and is likely not worth the trouble. I haven't got one installed myself, despite and now in part because my energy provider has been hounding me to install one, due to this push from the government. There's no reason to be an early adopter for this if the benefits aren't good, given how badly scuffed the first iteration was)

sanderjd 3y ago
Honest question: not worth what trouble? Our utility just came and installed one of these, and they just left a card hanging on our doorknob saying so. We were totally uninvolved...

mikelward 3y ago

Octopus Energy were talking about being able to do this using machine learning given only real-time access only to the total power consumption. https://youtu.be/g-RQ0dOPTtc?t=474&si=r0zhDUr3OaMieHOz https://youtu.be/g-RQ0dOPTtc?t=474&si=r0zhDUr3OaMieHOz They offer things like discounted rates for charging electric vehicles. And are talking about being able to tell people when they're using more power than usual that they forgot to turn the oven off or they're using their dishwasher during peak or whatever. Edit: he mentioned Voltaware which seems to be this: https://voltaware.com/blog/2021-07-01/voltaware-octopus-insights https://voltaware.com/blog/2021-07-01/voltaware-octopus-insi...