[londons_explore]

I recently learned that electricity meters cost ~150USD.

At that sort of price, for low usage users it might be multiple years simply to pay back the cost of the meter.

One can buy a $3 meter from China, but obviously it is less accurate. I'd like to see a system where less accurate meters are used, but you pay a small premium to cover any inaccuracies in metering.

[vegardx]

Are you sure you want less accurate meters? There's a lot of losses in the network itself, and without accurate meters it's hard to pinpoint where they are and if they can be fixed.

In Norway we quite recently switched to more accurate networked meters and at that time they said that as much as 30% of all electricity produced wasn't accounted for, which you end up paying for, one way or another. Some of these losses are from the network itself. But a not insignificant part was from people illegally tapping the grid or last-mile losses due to poorly maintained infrastructure that was hard to pinpoint without using expensive manpower to physically check every single connection.

[londons_explore]

Meter inaccuracies are sometimes over and sometimes under. Losses are always under.

Across enough thousands of meters, you should be able to separate the effects. I suspect the hundreds of millions saved if a country switched to cheap less accurate meters would easily pay for other methods of policing/detecting theft. For example, 'radar' down the electricity cables can see how far away every switch, device and wire is. It would be pretty straightforward to put radar devices at a few places on the public network, then effectively triangulate to some house who is stealing power because when they turn stuff on and off (which the radar can see, together with the cable length), no nearby customers meter sees the increased load.

[vegardx]

I don't really understand the argument you're trying to make. You want us to use less accurate meters and then pay a premium to cover those inaccuracies, which is supposed to be cheaper than just buying accurate meters? And then use some technology that doesn't seem to exist to detect losses and theft? If it was this easy we'd already be doing it.

These meters are more expensive, but not that much more expensive. The majority of the cost, by a long shot, comes from installing them. These meters also offer a lot of other capabilities, which greatly improves the reliability of the network. If you spread the cost of these meters over the projected lifespan we're talking about cents per month.