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Under the current system, I'm paying more for my neighbors' wasteful usage while the price is high and vice versa.
How do you determine it's being wasteful by the time of day? For example if I'm working at home using a lot of electricity during the day is that waste? I'm not using gas to commute, no one has to heat and provide electric for my office space....... If I cook dinner at home is that being wasteful instead of going out to eat?
As I said you may be penalizing more efficient people...
How do you determine it's being wasteful by the time of day? For example if I'm working at home using a lot of electricity during the day is that waste? I'm not using gas to commute, no one has to heat and provide electric for my office space....... If I cook dinner at home is that being wasteful instead of going out to eat?
As I said you may be penalizing more efficient people...
The wholesale price of electricity varies over the course of a day, sometimes wildly. Right now, there's no way for the consumer to know when electricity is at the most expensive wholesale price and no way for the utility to know which of its customers are using what percentage of that expensive juice and charge them accordingly. The smart meter technology can enable the utility to vary its rate in line with the wholesale rates it's paying and communicate that variable retail price to the customer. Armed with this info, the customer can choose to use less when the price is high and the utility will know it and adjust the bill to reflect the rate at the time of usage.
Just like we can choose to drive less and pay less often at the pump when gas is over $4 a gallon, this would enable us to make the choice to use less electricity during those hours when the price is 50% higher than average. You don't have to drive less when the price is $4 and you don't have to sweat when the price of electricity is high, but isn't it nice to have the freedom to choose to do so if you wanted to? I think some people fear that this technology will lead to them being made to use less electricity. I don't see what they think they're avoiding when this is already happening under the current system. I guess they prefer it when utilities make people use ZERO electricity temporarily during rolling blackouts!
Last edited by Bo; 05-18-2011 at 10:12 AM..
Reason: added info
The wholesale price of electricity varies over the course of a day, sometimes wildly.
And just where do you come up with this?
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Right now, there's no way for the consumer to know when electricity is at the most expensive wholesale price and no way for the utility to know which of its customers are using what percentage of that expensive juice and charge them accordingly. The smart meter technology can enable the utility to vary its rate in line with the wholesale rates it's paying and communicate that variable retail price to the customer. Armed with this info, the customer can choose to use less when the price is high and the utility will know it and adjust the bill to reflect the rate at the time of usage.
It is ridiculous to think one will be able to get electricity rates minute by minute or hour by hour.
For people to be able to shop around they MUST be living in cities and areas that are deregulated, ("have choice").
None of these providers offer anything other than fixed rate plans. For Texas check out:
When I see words like "I hope" "may" "probably" "IMO" the poster is talking fantasy world. Yes sometime in the future something like what you fantasize about might become reality but not anytime within the next century.
I don't know how many hundreds of things I've read about where "this technology can enable......." but never makes it into the real world.
Smart meters at this point are another way electric companies can screw their customers, period.
And Smart grids.... gimme a break. The country is broke, we can't afford to fix our road/bridge infrastructure and we are going to spend 2 trillion dollars upgrading our electrical infrastructure?
We need to build quite a few more nuclear reactors. I for one refuse to live like my grandparents.
It is ridiculous to think one will be able to get electricity rates minute by minute or hour by hour.
I just happen to know it off the top of my head, but I can cite a source that illustrates it. Here's a graph from an academic paper written by a Berkeley professor showing the price per kWh at some US utility over the month of June 2000. The highest horizontal line shows the rate charged by the utility. The black spiky lines show the HOURLY wholesale price that the utility was paying.
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For people to be able to shop around they MUST be living in cities and areas that are deregulated, ("have choice").
None of these providers offer anything other than fixed rate plans. For Texas check out:
Utilities can't vary the rates until they have some means to measure usage at a given time. The meters have to be deployed before the rates can change.
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When I see words like "I hope" "may" "probably" "IMO" the poster is talking fantasy world. Yes sometime in the future something like what you fantasize about might become reality but not anytime within the next century.
I don't know how many hundreds of things I've read about where "this technology can enable......." but never makes it into the real world.
Smart meters at this point are another way electric companies can screw their customers, period.
Kind of a curmudgeonly way to look at it, but you're entitled to your opinion.
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And Smart grids.... gimme a break. The country is broke, we can't afford to fix our road/bridge infrastructure and we are going to spend 2 trillion dollars upgrading our electrical infrastructure?
Apples and oranges. Roads and bridges are owned by government. The electrical infrastructure is owned by the utilities that built it, some of which are municipal, but most of which are private/public companies. Taxpayers won't be paying to upgrade the electrical grid, ratepayers will.
Apples and oranges. Roads and bridges are owned by government. The electrical infrastructure is owned by the utilities that built it, some of which are municipal, but most of which are private/public companies. Taxpayers won't be paying to upgrade the electrical grid, ratepayers will.
Mox nix, WE will still pay for it in higher utility rates, use some common sense.
And how many people in America don't use the electrical grid? .00000000000000000001%?
Stop and think about it for a minute, the utility companies can't afford to build any new plants so what do they do?
Dream up smart meters to charge people more for their electricity and use a propaganda campaign ALLUDING to cost savings that MIGHT occur sometime down the road........
Hmmmm, now where have I heard that fantasy before?
I just happen to know it off the top of my head, but I can cite a source that illustrates it. Here's a graph from an academic paper written by a Berkeley professor showing the price per kWh at some US utility over the month of June 2000. The highest horizontal line shows the rate charged by the utility. The black spiky lines show the HOURLY wholesale price that the utility was paying.
Ahhhh, another industry-sponsored research study.
So you are reading into this research paper that the utility companies will charge you accordingly?
It is ridiculous to think one will be able to get electricity rates minute by minute or hour by hour.
its common knowledge to those of us in the electrical industry.
the utility doesn't adjust what you're being charged the same as the varying rate they're paying; they have an average rate to bill customers.
in my end of the business, most of the material we use are traded commodities, and the price varies wildly throughout the day by as much as 20%, and yearly by as much as 400%. but we can't adjust our prices throughout the day either, so we use an average. on large scale projects, we can contract materials at whatever rate they happen to be at when we send an rfq, and that is the number we have to go with.
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