>> The real long term idea with smart metering isn't so much demand savings (though I think it was billed as that; and I agree the results are very underwhelming from everything I've seen), it's to start allowing dynamic energy tariffs and getting people incentivized to move load to cheaper times.
The original long/medium/short-term goal of "smart" meters was to eliminate the need to manually check meters and integrate that into the billing systems. It was a direct cost savings to delivery companies. All the fancy variable pricing stuff is an afterthought.
I phrase it as utilities got a gov-mandate to install you new stuff, pass on the cost to you, and save some monthly/bi-monthly opex cost that they can pocket themselves (or at least pat themselves on the back for).
If it costs more than it saves, they don’t mind, actually that’s great (for them).
In rural areas in Ontario, the system used 3G (and for some reason I think only supported 2G in the past) to send readings. So that will be another truck roll (or more likely, cheque to telecoms to keep up some old infra).
I also suspicious of $$$ technical investments to reduce relatively small costs (especially ones where a lot of the dollars leave the area).
It also facilitates half hourly settlement. Previously we used standard profile curves based on the average household to attribute consumption to each 30 minute settlement period, where with smart meters sending half hourly reads you can settle based on the actual consumption.
The transition period includes "elective half hourly settlement" which basically means that as a supplier you can selectively settle meters on a half hourly basis, which created an interesting (but time limited) arbitrage opportunity where you could do some data science to predict which meters would be beneficial to settle half hourly or not
I’m a bit confused: why do they need visibility into individual household’s load to accomplish this? Can’t you just look at what the whole city is drawing and order based on that?
Or do you mean fully dynamic pricing/billing to end users?
I think this is for situations where customers can choose a 3rd party energy provider. The utility transmits energy to the user and settles with the energy provider.
Makes sense to settle that up near real time, I guess.
This is on the wholesale side - as a supplier your customers consume energy which you're responsible for purchasing, and it's priced in 30 minute chunks. To get visibility into when your specific customers are consuming energy you need smart meter data from the household level
The original long/medium/short-term goal of "smart" meters was to eliminate the need to manually check meters and integrate that into the billing systems. It was a direct cost savings to delivery companies. All the fancy variable pricing stuff is an afterthought.