The aim being that if individual households could see how much they were using they would reduce their consumption. Whether it works in practice is a different matter.
The industry has a term "TTD" (time to drawer) for the IHD - last I heard it was typically measured in weeks. I suspect that tells you everything you need to know about theory vs practice.
Merely having a smart meter does not guarantee that outcome so some punitive measures, which could not be employed without smart meters, must be being considered therefore this must be the real reason behind their installation.
It has been no secret in the industry for many years that the primary reason for smart meters to to "manage" demand. Specifically, to be able to hike the price for several periods and so encourage people to reduce consumption. Back in the days when lecky was something like 10-12p/unit, the talk was of hiking the price to (say) 50p/unit for a couple of hours to manage a peak in demand/lull in supply.
And if that fails, then the disconnect (mandatory element of SMETS spec so present in all smart meters) can allow rolling power cuts just like we had in the 70s but more fine grained.
That is
THE primary function of smart meters and always has been. Everything else has always been secondary to that.
I strongly suspect that the "helping people to reduce consumption" is just an excuse, I see a few benefits (for the government/industry) to a well executed smart meter programme.
1. Avoiding the need to pay meter readers.
2. Enabling the time profile of customer's usage to be measured. This is a pre-requisite to introducing schemes that encourage customers to shift their demand to better match up with supply.
3. Giving more flexibility in rationing electricity in case demand exceeds supply. Right now the only real option is indiscriminate rolling blackouts. Smart meters with disconnect capability give more options.
3 is the main reason. We have long since given up on trying to supply what people want to use, and moved into "persuading" people to use what's available - and intermittent renewables (mostly wind) drives a lot of that.
But other intended benefits disappeared. I recall going to a talk a couple of years ago (just before covid) on smart meters - the guy giving the talk was "not very positive" about them. When I got to questions, I mentioned that I'd been to a talk he'd given some years earlier where he was waxing lyrical about the potential - but he seemed to have changed his position. He agreed with that summary
Trying to remember the other benefits that had been used to justify the cost. I do recall one of them was allowing the DNO to remotely monitor end user supply voltages, and detect outages, and thus improve network management and fault responses. But it turns out that the SMETS2 spec for voltage measurement is not accurate enough for the DNOs needs so that benefit got struck off the list.
IIRC, he went through a list of benefits that would not/could not be realised but had been used in the cost-benefit analysis - and came to the conclusion that smart metering would cost more than the benefits.
Another way they could use SM's is to bribe customers to restrict their consumption during those peak times, rather than penalising them for higher consumption. The suppliers have access to the 30 minute consumption data, they could make customers a refund of £x for every peak where they limited their consumption below a set level.
That's just getting going. Octopus are one of those
running a system in partnership with the people running the grid.
From what I have read France for one charges for electricity in a different way to the UK.
And other countries. I can't find it now, but in the past one of TheRegister's writers lived in rural <somewhere> and did a whole article on the "joys" of living with something like a 5A supply. Pretty basic - as part of the service head there's an MCB, if you want a higher capacity then you pay more
IF the supplier is prepared to allow it (in this case, they could not have a bigger supply without paying an eye watering amount to significant network upgrades).
In a previous job, we had an office in Italy. In hot weather (i.e. aircon running) they'd occasionally go offline (we'd see them disappear off the network) when they tripped their supply and had to "reboot" the whole office.
This brings to mind conversations I've had with UPS manufacturers (specifically, but not exclusively APC). It seems that UPS (uninteruptible power supply) manufacturers are happy to simply declare your supply inadequate rather than provide a means of staying within it. Specifically, a UPS will recharge it's batteries when the power comes back on - so now you are both running your full loads and recharging the batteries. In the real world with restricted supplies, this then raises the prospect of the UPS keeping you going through a power cut - then blowing/tripping your supply when the power comes back on. Manufacturer's answer was not to offer an option to restrict either charge rate or total draw - but you "simply" upgrade your power supply to suit their equipment.
We're talking about 'contracted agreements', not generic/legal 'rights'.
That's different. I was responding to Sunray when he wrote "As to rights of access, gas suppliers have equal rights (due to gas safety) to custom and excise which is greater than police." They do have such rights if there's (say) a gas leak - but otherwise they most certainly do not have such rights.
If, for example, they insist on replacing your meter, they cannot simply turn up, force entry, and change it - they would have to go through a process of telling you they want to do it and arranging a mutually acceptable time to do it. Only if you would not/could not come to such an arrangement would they then be able to apply for a warrant of entry. And of course, that's an area where smart meters are "dangerous" - in theory they still have to go through the same process for a remote (click a button on a computer screen) disconnection, and of course we all trust them never to cut corners or make "administrative errors" don't we
