[failingslowly]

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data

This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.)

> You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes.

My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energy use.

https://www.edfenergy.com/smart-meters/using-a-smart-meter/c...

[verisimi]

The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point.

Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.

[concordDance]

> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

This is likely to happen and is economically awful (far better to have constant carbon taxes), but it will be done because the majority supports it, not due to some government plot against the people.

[smolder]

Elected officials get into office with majority support of a constituency, but that's very far away from the majority of people supporting their collective actions while in office. In the US, politicians do what money wants them to, not voters. Consent of voters is often manufactured and misinformed.

[gambiting]

I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same.

(At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)

[CaptainMarvel]

That’s not quite right. All new smart meters have the ability to report electricity usage minute-by-minute.

You _currently_ have the choice to only report month-by-month, by kindly asking them to only do that. However, I agree with verisimi, and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before the government via energy suppliers can monitor your real time electricity usage.

It’ll be dressed up, of course, as being in your best interest, but you won’t have a choice. Smart meters were sold as being beneficial for customers, but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

At the most basic level this is a history of when you are at home or not.

[gambiting]

>>but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

What kind of power did you have before the introduction of smart meters, exactly?

[lazide]

The power to not have someone know if you’re at home and how much electricity you’re using at any given moment - and for any given moment over an arbitrary period in the past I guess?

[userbinator]

the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers

Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't.

If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

[gambiting]

>>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them.

Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world.

>>If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid.

Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.

[michaelt]

Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen thingy also uses the 'HAN'.

However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage. If that was all that was needed, there are much cheaper options designed for consumer self-install. Why did they go for the much more expensive and inconvenient smart meter+gprs option, if not to enable time-of-use tariffs?

[sofixa]

> Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

Where? In France the devices, called Linky and manufactured to a common standard by a few different companies, and mandatory, communicate via the grid itself over the CPL protocol. There are no SIM cards inside, and thankfully, lunatics have been suing to refuse to get their meter upgraded to Linky "BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS" bullshit which doesn't have any basis in reality.

[gambiting]

Is that in the UK or somewhere else?

>>However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage.

Of course - but I contest OP's claim that it has enough granularity to tell you that you're showering too much or that your tool shed uses too much energy - it doesn't allow that in the slightest.

[CaptainMarvel]

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses.

Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I worked at an energy supplier. I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data!

[gambiting]

>>Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I don't know if it's hilarious, more like unhelpful at best, rude at worst .

>>I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data

It wasn't "live" data though, was it? Just a breakdown of usage per-minute, but uploaded in batches, right? And which energy supplier was that? Because with Octopus you can only get live data by installing an extra(and optional) device called Octopus mini, their SMET2 meters have no such capability.

[beebeepka]

> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.

I am very conflicted. Deeply share your concerns regarding misuse of such info. It will be used as a weapon. But I am totally in favour of making wasters pay up, and not just fixed amounts.

I hate wasting resources.

[concordDance]

"Waster" isn't really a coherent concept when taken outside of an individual's value system. What might be waste for one person might simply be a sensible use of resources for another.

Doing for a drive to the countryside for a walk? Having a long and relaxing bath? Go-karting? Using a heated pool? Keeping the heater on a single house-level timer so they don't have to think about it rather than planning ahead what rooms they will be in later?

Everyone will have a different place they draw the "waste" vs sensible expenditure line.

The correct economic solution to this is CO2-offsetting taxes and letting each individual decide how they want to spend their resources. Trying to centrally plan for a hundred million diverse people with different things they like and care about is a recipe for unneeded misery.

[hgomersall]

Taxes just push the problem into poor people. If you want a fair solution we should have carbon/resource rationing. In fact, I'd prefer a solution in which the governments work hard (much harder than they are) to bootstrap the brave new world so everyone can benefit from a sustainable world.

[CaptainMarvel]

Taxes don't have to push the problem onto poor people at all. For example, the proceeds can be directly given to everyone equally which will usually disproportionately benefit poor people.

So why would you say that taxes would harm poor people? I think I know why.

In practice, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and the media have been almost completely captured by the wealthy to disproportionately benefit themselves.

Wealth is essentially zero sum game despite what many would say. Power is certainly a zero-sum game. When you have power over another, they have less power over you. I believe wealth is another form of power, a little indirect and not perfect, but the correlation is strong enough.

This means that there is no practical solution that won't harm poor people. This includes your proposal where you would like the government to "benefit everyone".

[concordDance]

Rationing is ridiculously inefficient.

People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch.

Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible:

UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take, are collectively owned by the people. So it could make sense to distribute those amongst the people. The people could then sell them in a free® market. This means we can work towards both goals at once: Those seeking to pollute more, could simply buy the carbon credits from their fellow people, who can now better afford to live. And, at the same time, total pollution is capped-ish, depending on the scheme.

As a fun note, UBI is just rationing out the available funds for UBI, so it would suffer from any rationing-specific failings that carbon rationing would suffer from.

[hgomersall]

We don't want trade. We want people to reduce their carbon consumption. In any case, you could always allow trading of rations.

[CaptainMarvel]

It’s up to individuals to decide if they are wasting their own resources. Everyone has a different perspective. Personally, I think SUVs are a waste and should be banned, but wouldn’t that be overreaching?

Individuals don’t pay for their waste when they aren’t paying for negative externalities.

That’s why a carbon tax is a better solution - it ensures people are paying the true price for a resource. Let people decide their own life after that, they’ll do a better of job of it than someone else deciding their life for them.

(You probably need more than just a carbon tax to fairly price the resource. For example, mining fossil fuels causes health issues for workers, and impacts the local environment.

[beebeepka]

It's a slippery slope for sure but you have to draw the line somewhere.

For example, if there's a water shortage and someone decides they can afford (financially) to use as much as they please, that's not going to end well.

I don't quite understand the obsession with carbon. Not everything can be mapped to carbon without some mental gymnastics.

[CaptainMarvel]

During a water shortage, if most of the water is being taken up by few wealthy individuals, then there are negative externalities being created: people dying, falling sick, being hospitalised, protests and violence that takes policing resources, etc.

The market has failed to fully price the external effects generated by some economic activities, thus the government must step in and impose a tax on all water use so that they can correct the negative externality.

At the simplest level, the government can use the proceeds to buy the water themselves and distribute it to those in need. For example, to reduce bureaucracy during a crisis, they could pay for the first 5 litres of daily residential water use for each individual directly on their bills.

The problem is again: the resource is not being priced correctly.

[avgcorrection]

We’re all (well you know) a bunch of primates who travel from single home suburbs in metal boxes in order to work in front of a screen. Going around worrying about who waters their lawn the most excessively[1] is largely a waste of time.

There are exceptions though for things like droughts. But largely this goes beyond this obsession with looking over each other’s hedges (digitally or actually).

[1] Because the agricultural lobby would like to redirect the focus from them to random suburbanites (see California).

[autoexec]

You don't even have to worry about the government (it seems unlikely that most of us will see a "10min showers only" law anytime soon), but it's usually private companies collecting and selling the data and they're happy to use that data against you in any way that they can.

[ZeroGravitas]

Fossil fuel interests have really rotted a lot of minds with their propaganda.

In some ways this may turn out to be a bigger crime than the carbon issues you think are just a conspiracy to control shower length.

[concordDance]

I don't think this is fair to him. He's not alleging carbon stuff is a conspiracy to control shower length, merely that moralizers will want to control everything they see as "waste".

[avgcorrection]

Rotting minds, really?

[ZeroGravitas]

If someone close to me said that they fear an authoritarian government because the length of their showers might be curtailed, or the power draw of their shed might be outlawed, I'd be genuinely worried about their mental health.

[avgcorrection]

> close to me said

Public forum though. No one has seen a psychologist because a text box intervened about their “rotting [brain]”.

[jonathanlydall]

As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.

I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.

This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.

[Qwertious]

>As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.

>I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.

The core problem is that these devices are garbage, and nobody cares. I don't mean that scornfully, I'm saying these devices are way over-provisioned and yet are unreliable anyway because they are very carelessly designed, and nobody cares because 1) they have no economic incentive to care, and 2) in the software world it's normal for cheap devices to fail within 10 years, and the people who refuse to accept this norm have no recourse except building their own piece of electronics (i.e. take up a hobby).

Demanding they provide the data 'in a standard format' lets us put lipstick on the pig, it doesn't actually solve the core problem of the device being a piece of shit.

[andrewaylett]

In the UK, there are three (or four, depending on how you count them) types of device associated with smart meters.

Electricity meters are designed to last, and contain a radio that lets them communicate use to the distributor. What type of radio depends on where in the country you are.

The Gas meter is battery powered, and tries to send data to the electricity meter every half hour, over Zigbee. This works better for some than for others.

Then there's the in-home display, you get one with the meter but it's not required for reporting -- it's purely a display. At some point between the meter being installed and us moving in the one that goes with our house went walkabout, so we don't have one. Except we actually sort-of have two: our supplier makes a small box (with an ESP32 in it) that sends them near-realtime data (and also, happily, completes the otherwise-unreliable Zigbee mesh because the junk I have in the garage blocks the signal) and before that arrived I got a Hildebrand Glow, which talks MQTT to my Home Assistant.

The electricity meter receives the current price if it's a normal non-dynamic price, and the Glow can read that, but can also cope with Octopus Agile with its half-hourly pricing because it's able to fetch that data over the Internet.

The raw metering data isn't quite available to everyone in open formats, but there are procedures that one may go through to be able to receive data and at least one company then makes that data available to the consumer. It's not as fine-grained as the data available on the local Zigbee mesh, which is why those same companies also sell hardware that'll join said mesh. Unfortunately the mesh isn't open for use by arbitrary hardware.

You can also get random monitoring devices that sit on the consumer side of the meter and give you whatever capabilities you buy, and it sounds like the article is an example of one of those, rather than of a smart meter. The author would probably be better off with an actual smart meter, if that's an option.

[JW_00000]

At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more than 10 years given the investment the government is putting in. (I think roll-out started like 7 years ago and is expected to be finished around 2030 in Belgium.)

[sofixa]

Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.

[gambiting]

We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong.

I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's energy consumption alongside(and therefore show the day's cost so far). Octopus provides an API to query the kWh used....but only for the last day. I even got their little Octopus Mini that broadcasts live usage to their app but I have not been able to query the live data from it from my raspberry, I don't have the necessary skills in web technologies to do that unfortunately :-(

[Angostura]

If you use Home Assistant on the Pi there is an Octopus integration that you might find handy. It even works with the Octopus Mini

https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/

Hope this is useful

[gambiting]

Ooooooh thanks that is actually super useful - had no idea this existed! Thank you!

[maccard]

Mine comes with a display that shows live usage by energy rather than price. The octopus app shows my usage for yesterday in £ for octopus tracker, broken down into 30m increments.

[paganel]

I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all.

As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?

[albert180]

Your Grid is operated by the french government? Is there some infrastructure you haven't sold out abroad

[waiwai933]

The UK energy market is complicated.

The high-voltage transmission grid is operated by National Grid, which is a British company. Distribution to end-users is operated at a regional level by one of six* Distribution Network Operators [1], three of which are British-owned.

Consumers can purchase electricity from any electricity supplier that is willing to sell to them. Naturally, since it all goes into one grid, suppliers are responsible for ensuring that they purchase from generators and sell to consumers an equal amount of electricity. EDF is one of several suppliers in the market. (There were many more until energy prices rose following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and many suppliers collapsed.)

The gas distribution system works similarly, but I'm not familiar with the details.

* It's slightly more complicated, but it rounds to six.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator