A lot of misinformation here. I recently had an electricity smart meter installed, after careful consideration of the pros and cons. Which are all pros, no cons that I can think of.
1st pro, a big one. My electricity supplier, EDF Energy, sent me a personal e-mail offering me £100 credit to my account if I had one fitted. I had been dithering up till then. They were true to their word, the £100 credit appeared in my account a week later.
Subject: Fancy £100 credit just for having a smart meter fitted?
Have a smart meter installed at no extra cost and we’ll credit your account with £100. Book your smart meter appointment before 03/08/2022 and when your meter has been installed we'll credit your account with £100
£100 bill credit offer - To be eligible you must be a residential customer who has been emailed directly by us with the details of this promotion and you must not have a SMETS2 meter already installed at your property. You'll have to have provided a valid email address.
You must have booked a smart meter install appointment with us by 03/08/2022. Appointments scheduled to take place after 10/08/2022 will still be eligible for the £100 credit if they were booked before this date
I no longer need to submit meter readings. I pay quarterly in arrears, not using direct debit, and often bills were estimated if I had not been able to submit one when needed, for all sorts of lifestyle reasons I won't go into. I am now prepared to set up a monthly direct debit, benefit from the slightly reduced cost for doing that (logical, I am borrowing money for only one month instead of three), and no longer need to budget for a bigger bill every quarter. Knowing that my bills will be accurate, no more dodgy estimation. Pay for what I use, on my standard variable contract, when I use it, not some sort of smoothed out estimated over the year sort of thing.
I can log into my "Energy Hub" from wherever I might be, and see just what I have used each day, or month etc. The in home display also provides this info. Example:
I agreed to readings every 30 minutes. This does, or should, help the grid understand how the demand varies on a detailed localised level. I can change this period any time I like, from my online account..
And can show me things like this: The peak, BTW, is when my immersion heater in my olde fashioned hot water cylinder kicks in to provide my hot water. I am on "Economy 7" midnight until 7:00 AM. Which suits me, and probably the grid. Baseload nuclear and wind. Washing machine also runs overnight, sometimes I do even turn on the tumble dry function
Have also discovered that it's actually cheaper to do the washing up by filling a kettle or two of water rather than running the immersion heater every day. My dishwasher is broken ATM, but once I fix it it will also run overnight. Likewise wake up at six and take a 10 kW shower on the off peak rate, before seven. Immersion heater is going to get a 7 day programmable timeswitch instead of the daily one, so my luxurious baths once or twice a week are still available, but otherwise don't need to keep all the hot water hot.
I can also see exactly what every appliance uses, on the in home display, in real time, either in £ or kWh, or instantaneously in Watts. How much a shower costs, boil a kettle, use the combi microwave rather than the main oven, take a big bath (costs less than a long shower BTW). So much more stuff.
I can even deduce from that graph when the fridge/freezer was kicking in and out, hour by hour. I was not at home that day. My base load is a bunch of IT stuff always on, but kept down to about 30W continuous, by attention to detail.
Sure, conspiracy theorists can drive themselves nuts speculating about imagined scenarios.
FWIW, my meter was fitted with a large extra antenna to ensure that it communicates reliably, there is almost no mobile coverage on any network indoors, let alone where my meter is positioned. In a total blackspot for any mobile network. Nevertheless it is working well. These meters do not use the mobile phone network, but a different one, the precise details of which are obscure ATM. They can also "mesh" together, so that a cluster of meters, only a few, even just one having signal, can get the data out, but that requires reasonable uptake in the local area. I suspect that my good install, with the superior antenna, might be doing that for my neighbours down the hill, whose meters were previously not working, but now are.
This is of course a SMETS 2 device. The old SMETS 1 meters have all their own set of problems, interoperability between different suppliers being just one.
SMETS2 meters are interoperable between energy suppliers, one should be able to take over from another seamlessly, if you want to change supplier.
My meter is also compatible with export measuring, should I say install solar. EDF will pay me something like 5.6p/unit of anything surplus, Should I install that in future. Not a lot maybe but if I wasn't using it all in the daytime (probably not given my lifestyle), that would all be grist to the mill. It all adds up. This is entirely separate from the old export guarantee tariffs for solar, which are pretty much gone now.
Whilst they were at it, EDF also upgraded the main fuse to allow me to take 100A, should I want to. Its complicated, my house is on a "loop supply" meaning that a single phase comes into my house, then is looped across to my two neighbours. In total it cannot supply 300A to all three of us, however I have got in first, so I may have the lion's share. They will be stuck with whatever they have, ATM, probably 68A.
OK, I am fairly clued up about all this, an electronic engineer, have the area managers phone number, and he personally came down to supervise the installation. I did tell him that if it was not satisfactory the word would soon enough get out, around my neighbourhood. Whilst his technician/fitter (sorry, they like to be called engineers") got on with it, a slightly tricky installation, took nearly two hours to get it right, we had a good chat about this and that, the pure EV car, and his fitter's pure EV van, how well the EVs were performing for their duties, each had made a 200 mile round trip to do this, no other jobs booked that day. That surely cost EDF far far more than the simple hardware cost OK maybe I was treated specially.
The electricity companies are incentivised (well disincentivised actually if they don't achieve >50% installation in an area, which they have not yet in mine). Possibly why the £100 bribe for me to do it, and maybe informally persuade my diehard refuser neighbours to go along with it Maybe others lower down the hill from me who have previously done so but whose have never worked, might find that they soon start "meshing" with mine.
At the moment smart meters are "free". Well, we are all paying for them added onto everyone's bills. The "government "does not pay for them from some magic money tree. That may not continue forever, and, trust me, sooner or later you are going to have to have one, or stick with something primitive which utterly limits your ability to take best advantage of future energy pricing policies.
Sure, the early implementations were poor if not utterly dysfunctional. But nowadays, for some of us, not yet everyone, they are IMO rather useful. And adequately mature, based on my recent experience, and much more from friends, relatives and neighbours.
I'd say, nowadays, just "get with the programme", there is little to lose and much to gain.
My next step is to get a gas smartmeter fitted. I buy my gas from a different utility company, their smartmeter will link to my electricity meter wirelessly running off it's own internal battery (how long that lasts I dunno, several years anyway) Otherwise it wold have needed to be a separate installation, own mains connection, own antenna etc. which would have been a pain. As it is, I am promised a very simple installation, now that the electricity one is in, working and communicating properly.
Conspiracy theorists will, obviously, disagree, but some actual facts from them seem to be sadly lacking.
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) and compare to past readings
