My Not So Smart Smart Meter

Not long ago, PG&E came by and installed a Smart Meter on our home. Now, having worked as an executive in the electricity markets, both retail and wholesale for the last 6 years, I admit that I was actually somewhat excited about this prospect. I have become a bit of an energy geek over the years, but more importantly I like to save money. But to do so, I needed a bit more information. Even my simple utility bill is so convoluted that it sometimes feels like it was written by Kafka. And my old dumb meter didn't give me much information other than how much energy I used each month.

But let's digress for moment to make sure we're all on the same page; energy is not the same thing as power. Energy is an expression of how much power you use (or produce) over a given period of time. It's a bit like a river; power is how fast the river is moving, energy reflects the depth and width and volume of that river. So if some local do-gooder is bragging about their solar system and tells you they have a 4.2 kilowatt solar array, that's how much power the system might be able to produce at a given moment in time. That same solar array, sitting under the sun for hours, would produce 4.2 kilowatt hours of energy for every hour it sits in that sunlight. However, if that array is sitting behind a beautiful oak tree, it will produce a fraction of that amount of energy since the array's inbound fuel (light) is blocked, and being utilized by that same tree. Similarly when you get your monthly utility bill, mostly what you see is your energy usage;  it might say "you used 978kWh this month". Both power and energy are an expense to the utility, and both figure into your total monthly bill. But back to my smart meter for right now.

My smart meter, for the first, time, would help me get a handle on our day-to-day energy costs. For the record we didn't have a big bill, but that's beside the point. I hate paying a nickel more than I need to for something I barely use.

So the day came, said meter was installed, clocks were reset, and I looked forward to the ability to dive into the intimate details of my bill. I went to PG&E's portal and logged in. Sure enough, there it was. Me. Our home. Making our little contribution to the socialist welfare state monopoly called PG&E. Unfortunately, the important information that I needed wasn't there - specifically, how much does it costs me to run my dryer in the middle of day? Or my lights? Or a microwave? It's been hot lately and we're thinking about an air conditioner, how much would it cost me to run it? 

None of that was there. The only thing there, was a bunch of stuff about kWh's. I used this many kWh on this day. And this much kWh this month. PG&E, if you're listening, I think most people would like to know how much the energy and the power costs them. I may be an energy geek but what I care about these days is money, and where it's going. Or not going. Nothing of the sort. My smart meter made no difference in my bill. In fact, like everyone else in the state, my bill went up (if only very marginally) due to the "rate-payer" tax imposed by PG&E for their smart meter program. I'm sure this felt the same to me as it did to many consumers back in the 1960's when AT&T introduced, with great fanfare, the "white telephone." All those masses who were longing for variation, now had a choice. You could have a black phone or a white phone. Thus was born the checkered black and white linoleum to play off the latest color scheme of the AT&T fashionistas. Well at least they got a choice...not so much with the smart meter.

At SunEdison where I ran our global operations, we provided this information to all our customers via our online portal. We told them how much power they generated and how much power they consumed. We told them how much energy they consumed or produced. We told them how much they saved with their solar system, real savings, based on their existing utility tariffs and rates. We even broke it down for them in 15 minutes slices. All of that, which we offered our commercial customers free of charge, was not available to me from my utility. The guys and gals who actually made up the tariffs and rates themselves. Go figure.

I threw in the towel. Who knows which widget in my house was costing me my child's inheritance. I figured it was about time I got a solar array installed since I've been working in the industry for almost 6 years, and we'd finally settled down at a location for longer than 18 months. At least then I would get to see how much energy I was NOT taking from PG&E, but rather how much energy I was selling them. 

Boom - system installed, monthly bill reduced to... negative? Hmm. Sort of, but what's this pink thingie they sent me? I go online to my energy portal and... find that PG&E took whatever smarts the meter had, and threw it out the window. All the energy information they had been giving me on the website was gone, vaporized in the data ether at the socialist monopoly headquarters, no doubt in an IBM mainframe built in 1977 stuffed in the basement of their San Francisco HQ. When I inquired, they told me their smart meters don't work with solar systems. Come again?

You see when you run a generator that's plugged in at your home, which really is what a solar system is, then the meter has to count both "goes into's" and "goes out-of's". This is called "Net metering", because your counting your "net" energy usage. Sometimes, you actually produce more than you consume, and that excess energy is put back onto the grid for your neighbors, both friend and foe, to use as they will. As it turns out, PG&E, with their approximately 60,000 independent little (and in some cases big) solar users, didn't buy that option from the vendor when they bought the smart meter plan. So, while they couldn't tell me when and where I could save money when they put the smart meter in, now their smart meter couldn't tell me how much energy I used versus how much I produced. They calculate that via a spreadsheet team using MS Excel, and they'd get me a statement at the end of the year after everyone got through with all those keystrokes.

Wow. That's. Uhm. Actually, I was speechless. The utility succeeded where so many others had tried and failed; I was literally dumbstruck.

They did promise me they we're on that problem, they'd get that fixed, and that at some point in the future, we'll be able to see that information through their portal. Should be about the time the system fails in around 2035, and when senility begins to set in. In the meantime, they send me a pink sheet estimate every month that tells me how much they think they are going to owe me at the end of the year. They also have some legal language in there that says my actual mileage may vary, and that the pink sheet may not really reflect reality. Generally. Sort of. You know, that kind of thing. 

So why is PG&E investing in smart meters? Well, it does let them turn off your service if you're late on your bill. Considering that it costs them somewhere between $500-1,000 to run a meter reader out to a home to do a shut down, a smart meter seems like a pretty good deal, particularly if you automate it. Add to that they do get better information on their local distribution system than they've ever had in the history of the utility. This is ultimately about the needs of the monopoly, not the customers. Eventually, down the line somewhere, we consumers will no doubt benefit from the system. In the meantime it's best if we just wander around in the typical utility fog, bouncing into random bill increases, rate hikes and other things that go bump in the night. 

For the time being, however, every time I try to get smarter, the monopoly does its best to add a bit more fog to the room. When I was in the military back in the 80's, we had a saying - we knew that communism didn't work because we lived it every day. And like that same world, in true Orwellian style, this time the utility is trying to make me dumber with a program called the smart meter.