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by protocolture 18 days ago
>Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.

Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste.

Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consumer. Higher prices when we need electricity would be a horrid state of affairs when rents have doubled in 5 years and a lot of people are barely holding on.
1 comments
rswail 17 days ago
Smart meters don't make things better or worse, they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering than the century of multiple meters for peak vs off-peak consumption, as well as making meter reading/billing cheaper.

They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure.

Rents have not doubled in 5 years.

Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa.

https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/rent-inflation

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protocolture 17 days ago
Well my rent went from 320 to 520. And then they wanted 580 so we are moving to a slightly nicer place for 600. Not quite doubled but near enough. My area has had larger increases than that. Bloke up the road had to have his daughter move home and take up 300 dollars of the rent, which is what her apartment was costing her before covid.

> they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering

Right and we all have to pretend that the technology is neutral and act surprised when it ends up being used for anti consumer purposes? Thats the usual game isn't it?

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rswail 16 days ago
On rentals: Anecdata vs ABS statistics. No one is arguing that rents haven't gone up, but the rise peaked post COVID at ~8% and are now roughly reverted to the mean of 3-4% pa.

On smart meters:

Victoria has had them for 2 decades now.

If there were anti-consumer uses that our retailers or distributers took advantage of we'd know about them by now.

We've also had a fully privatized grid for quarter of a century, with generators, transmission, distribution, and retail separated.

The rorts have been by the distributors "gold plating" the poles/wires, and some machinations of the NEM by coal/gas generators.

Neither of which were caused by the smart meter rollout.

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