We like to approach everything from a different and sometimes disruptive perspective: energy buying, energy "risk", TPIs, energy "shortage" etc. And although we love Smart Meters, and have been a fan of SM from day one: Aren't we forgetting that it will all be about what SM can do despite (some) people getting hung up on arcana like technology and data flows?
End users are mostly content to get accurate monthly reads. If they can get half hourly reads, that's good too. Worrying about how reads are delivered is akin to sitting in a restaurant obsessing about what is happening in the kitchen. Most people would rather not know- their judgment of success depends on the eating experience, not the recipe or the ingredients or how skillful the chef is. As vital as those things are to delivery, end users don't generally find them important. And so with data. Just do it. Do you know how to program computers? Probably not.But you're reading this.
We have been saying for a while that the intersection between phone and metering will fracture. And why not? Phones themselves now include fixed and mobile while blurring the difference between computing and television while disrupting old models of content delivery. The visual display of energy metering information may not be as compelling as seeing a movie, but the mechanics behind delivery isn't that much different.
The next generation of wireless technology will give rise to the internet of things, where everything has an IP address. Pulses of electrons and molecules in energy flowing through utilities will simply be one more type of digital information. But wireless or smart metering only refers to the medium - the important thing is the message. How food gets from field to factory to kitchen to plate is mere detail, even most of the time to the gourmet.
An example is to compare the Verizon Hub Phone and the Onzo Energy Meter
The Verizon Hub Phone has several nifty features: Wireless and Fixed Calls, Cable TV, traffic reports, web access, call forwarding, contacts etc etc. In short a iPhone type experience based on touch technology that integrates several existing products. This is done to smarten up the home phone and make it more accessible to the technophobes - they don't care how it works they just want to see their energy bill. Which they can't do. Yet.
You can't even see your energy bill on the Onzo, although you can see energy use. It looks really cool and geeky. But why pay the same price as the Hub Phone for far less? Surely the same experience can be delivered from a meter to any number of existing screens: Phone, TV, PC or the Verizon Hub Phone. And probably to similar UK products coming soon from the likes of Vodafone or O2. Of course it can. And for cheaper. It's only a matter of time.The leap from meter to phone or a similar destination is only one of imagination.The whole point of modern ICT is to simplify things. Not to add yet another application or device, no matter how cool it might look.
Smart is another word for intelligence. And the intelligence in smart meters is the data and various levels of interpreting it. The device itself is actually as dumb as that hunk of metal currently residing under 26 million stairs. It's not the gadget - that's dumb in the meaning of silent. It's the widget on the screen - that's smart.