It’s been a quiet summer in Brexitland. After a vicious few weeks of back-stabbing and in-fighting, our politicians departed to calmer climes. While they holidayed, our glorious successes in Rio have provided ample news coverage to fill the gap, meaning that it’s been a great time for the Whitehall mandarins to bury any unfortunate information about the state of the GB Smart Metering project.
Smart Meter Update
- Published
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“Hello, this is the British Electricity Smart Meter hotline. You are number two million, four hundred and sixty eight thousand, two hundred and twenty three in a queue. We’re sorry your smart meter has disconnected you and that you have no electricity. We are working to upgrade the firmware in all of our smart meters and hope to have your power restored sometime in the next six months. Thank you for your call.”
It’s the scenario that no-one in the energy industry wants to talk about – the day that Britain’s smart meters go wrong or get hacked and millions of users lose power. It will probably never happen, but some things have such appalling consequences that we shouldn’t design and deploy something that makes even that small probability possible. But we have. And nobody appears to have thought about making sure it’s possible to recover from it.
Squirrels, Grid Security and a Stuffed Rudd
Probably the most effective way for any terrorist group or belligerent power to cripple a Western nation and bring it to its knees is to destroy its electricity grid. Without power, most of the infrastructure will crumble into chaos within a few weeks. Manufacturing would come to a standstill, along with healthcare, transport, banking, mobile communications and retail. That was seen in Iraq, where 70% of the generating capacity was destroyed during the Gulf war, in what has been described as a crime against humanity. At that time, grid destruction relied on physical means – dropping bombs on power stations and sub-stations. As we integrate more electronics and software into the grid, you no longer need expensive munitions to blow things up – terrorists can do it from a computer.
It’s two years since I last wrote about the cybersecurity issues within the GB smart meter rollout. At that time the response from the industry was dismissive. In the past six months, three things have happened which bring the risk back into focus. We’ve seen the first major grid cyber attack in the Ukraine; secondly, smart home owners with Nest thermostats have discovered that firmware updates can stop them operating and the third is that reports have come in of smart meters in the UK which have stopped working. None of that means our grid is going to be hacked tomorrow, but they all point out that what has been dismissed as impossible may not be quite so difficult as the industry and DECC would like to believe. Despite that, heads are still firmly in the sand as the UK Government continues to press ahead with a smart metering programme that is not so much climate-friendly as terrorist-friendly.
Smart Power, Smart Meters and Smart Batteries
This week saw the launch of a new report entitled Smart Power, which investigates the future of our electricity supply. It comes from a new body – the National Infrastructure Committee (NIC), and highlights the hole in supply caused by the planned closure of two thirds of our existing power stations by 2030, providing recommendations on the changes that they believe are required to ensure security of supply.
Unfortunately it’s promoted itself using the old trick of highlighting its major benefit as saving consumers money, with the headline press message suggesting it could deliver them savings of up to £8.1 billion per year in 2030.
I wish that the sector could get over its fixation with these spurious claims, so that we can focus on the real problem, which is the lack of a joined up energy policy. The “savings” in this report aren’t what a consumer would expect a saving to be, which is lower prices, but instead a potential reining in of cripplingly higher prices which would result from doing nothing. In other words, if we spend a bit more to increase bills now, we might not have to spend a lot more as a result of a further decade of dithering. It reminds me of the protection rackets of gangster Chicago, where shopkeepers were forced to pay off mobsters to prevent having their businesses destroyed. Why the energy sector wants to continue with its amateur production of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” escapes me, but that’s clearly who the commission’s chair, Lord Adonis, is modelling himself on. Cauliflowers all round…
UK Parliament calls for Evidence on Smart Metering Programme
As readers of my blog will know, I am concerned about the GB Smart Metering programme, not because of any issues with smart meters per se – they can be an important part of a smarter grid. My concern has always been that the GB programme will fail to deliver most of the potential benefits of smart metering, instead saddling consumers with the cost of a lot of obsolete technology.
Now it looks as if that message may be getting across. Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee has just started an evidence check and is requesting input from anyone with relevant views on the GB Smart Metering Programme. You have until midday on 28th January and can submit comments on their website. It claims they will be “pre-moderated” and that “Your comment will not be treated as formal written evidence to the Committee.” I hope that’s just standard wording and not a devious attempt to dismiss evidence.
Some initial mistakes pushed the technology in the wrong direction. Instead of correcting them, DECC has applied more and more complex sticking plasters whilst denying the underlying issues, to the point where the programme is now:
- The most complex system in the world
- The most expensive system in the world
- Based on technology which is heading to be obsolete by the early 2020s.
To justify its value, DECC has ignored evidence on consumer behaviour, relying instead on wishful thinking from academics and consultants. As more is learnt from other deployments around the world it is clear that the benefits have been vastly overstated. One utility – British Gas, almost certainly has enough data to provide a clear picture on long term benefits, but this has not been released, probably because it would torpedo the current impact assessment.
I believe it is the time for a thorough review to ensure that Britain gets the smart metering system it needs. If the current programme continues it will almost certainly overrun on cost. Parts of it will be obsolete by the time the deployment is complete and a new replacement programme will need to start by the end of 2020 if the meters are to continue operating, with all of the associated costs. It has all of the hallmarks of a major IT disaster, but one where the public will be more conscious than ever before of the true cost of a Government screw-up, because it will be clearly visible on their inflated energy bills.
The UK Government departments and Non-Departmental Government Bodies have widely different approaches to basing policy on evidence. At its best we have NICE – the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which is world recognised for its competence in using evidence to direct clinical and prescribing policy. However, at the shallow end of the evidence pool we find the desperate doggy paddling of DECC, whose mandarins still pursue the approach of policy leading evidence, i.e. they make up their minds about what they want to do, then manufacture the “evidence” to support the policy.
GB Smart Meters Delayed Again. Again.
It’s that time of year when the days get dark and cold, and the energy media turns its interest to the possibility of power cuts in the coming winter. Which also means it’s the time for DECC to slip out their Annual Report on the Roll-out of Smart Meters, in the hope that no one will notice it.
As expected, everything’s slipped, but this time, for the first time, we get an example of how DECC fudges the benefits figures they claim justify the smart metering programme. I sometimes wonder whether I’m the only person who reads these reports beyond the rose-tinted executive summary, as if you dig beneath the spin, they tell a clear and repeated story of a project that is going badly wrong. So for anyone who didn’t make it past page 6, here’s the truth about what’s happening with the GB smart metering deployment.