It seems that they will pay for themselves
in only 42 years:
Smart meters will cost each British household £420 and save people just “a tenner a year”, according to reports.
Cost-benefit estimates for the British smart meter programme vary hugely, with figures ranging from modest savings of around £26 a year (as we reported last year) to the Mail on Sunday’s latest guess coming from Gordon Hughes, an economist at the University of Edinburgh.
“The introduction of the smart meter is a dog's breakfast. At best it is misconceived and an astonishingly expensive project. For those claiming it will bring major savings, I say they need to grow up,” Hughes dutifully raged for the Sunday newspaper.
The £11bn project, which came about in part because of European Union directive 2009/72/EC, snappily titled “Directive 2009/72/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 July 2009 concerning common rules for the internal market in electricity and repealing Directive 2003/54/EC (Text with EEA relevance)”, along with a similar directive on gas meters, is supposed to put smart meters into 80 per cent of households by the year 2020.
When I was a wee lad, government agencies were able to do things like put a Man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. Now they mandate programs that have a 40+ year ROI:
Four years ago a British report revealed that the cost of installing smart meters in the UK is £390 per household, while more recent estimates are that the benefits are now as low as £11 per household, agreeing with the University of Edinburgh’s Hughes’ estimates to the Mail on Sunday. All costs for installing the UK smart meter network, from the backend systems to the consumer unit in your home, are met by hiking up your gas and electricity bills.
The future is stupid.
6 comments:
I suspect that the ROI is so bad because they still plan on having the staff to go out and read each "smart meter".
...... and was only one agency that put those men on the moon. Something they could never do Today. Just imagin the EPA and OSHA regs that would be voilated!!!
The RIO isn't really a concern for them. What really counts is the ability to remotely shutoff your power, like California did some years ago, or to make you "voluntarily" shift your "high-usage" jobs to "off-hours" times.
Also, some smart meters can combine with the IOT to allow your usage patterns to be sold to marketers. Just think how they are salivating over being able to track 'yet another' portion of your life & monetize it.
Why should a meter that does nothing but measure how much electricity you use have any ROI at all? What savings can there be if you replace something that measures watt-hours with something that measures watt-hours and they're both just as accurate? If they save a five minutes of someone's time to read it, at $12/hour, they only save $1. I can't see why people would expect an ROI.
What people overlook is that the new electronic meters NEVER read the same as the mechanical meters do. They read higher. CA utilities got a rate hike without needing to get permission, just by doing this. Add in the loss of most of the meter-reading jobs, and they made out like a bandit.
What Will points out is interesting. Sounds like the utility companies have taken a lesson from the Warmist computer modelers.
The smart meter calls in the readings over the internet or by cell eliminating the need for someone to read the meter on a monthly basis. theoreticly saving money. Unless of course some union rule still says somebody needs the double check the reading.
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