It's not just Energy Australia that isn't ready, the whole country is way behind the 8 ball on smart metering. I now have an electronic meter at my house with a PC serial port. As a consumer of electricity I cannot access the data that it can readily provide. This leads me to think how poorly equipped we are deal with energy demand management which is the elephant in the room when it comes to reducing the need for fossil fuel based energy.
Imagine for a moment that you get into your new car for a trip to any destination. Instead of the usual dashboard there is a blank panel. The windscreen is crazed and hard to see through. You have no indication of speed, distance or fuel levels. To get to where your going you will be required to keep within the speed limits and not run out of fuel. You will not know how far you have travelled or whether the car has enough fuel to get there. Most people would find this situation unacceptable and immediately look for some way of solving the problem.
But this is exactly the situation most householders are in. They go in to their home and there is nothing to indicate how much power, gas or water is being consumed as they 'drive'. While service meters are usually fitted to property boundaries, there is nothing to guide the householder on an instantaneous feedback level to their 'destination', an efficient and well equipped low resource consumption home. They are 'driving' their house virtually blind.
Now imagine a meter in your lounge or kitchen that displays exactly the power, water and gas consumption of your dwelling 'live'. A low energy display that softly glows green when usage levels are low, then changes to orange as usage climbs above set parameters. High consumption causes the colour to go red and each morning and evening a full energy usage graph is available to show when high consumption occurred. Out of character events are emailed to your mobile and you can send a command to reduce or turn off various appliances. Actually there is no need to imagine, it's already possible. Real green jobs are just waiting to be created. Massive reductions in expenditure on new power stations and distribution networks are avoided as end users finally get the 'dashboard' in their living room. It's win, win, win for people and the environment.
Reducing the use of energy is the quickest and most effective way of dealing with climate change. And effective monitoring and display of that energy use is the cheapest and fastest way to effect human behaviour in a positive way. That's why 'smart metering needs to be rolled and at the maximum speed. Renewables then become very effective in replacing the remaining energy requirements.
Human behaviour is easily altered if accurate and useful information is made available to people to allow them to make good decisions. 'Driving' blind as we are now is not going to result in changes to energy use quickly enough to do what is urgently needed to prevent impending environmental disasters.
Much of what I have written above is contained in a letter to my local MP, a minister in the Qld govt. Their needs to be as much money spent on getting information to the end user and energy efficiency, as their is on energy production from renewables.
Posted Saturday 16 Jan 2010 @ 11:38:33 pm from IP
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