Re: The paranoia!
"Smart meter costs (to customers) were estimated in an earlier post as around £300 initial, £500 lifetime - I'm not sure if the latter figure includes the costs of the additional power used by the meter itself"
Estimated by somebody who obviously does not have a clue. Retail, one-off in the UK for something like the Iskraemeco ME 372 - about £130. Brought in bulk from China.. much cheaper. Basically close to cost of doing a single manual one-off special read. If you are doing regular replacement of old units (that are mechanical and thus wear out), you will replace them with a smart unit wherever possible.
For manual reading, I had real data in previous job, but work out a human meter reader doing around 100-150 reads per day on average (rural areas are a much lower rate, inner city can be higher) over a few hundred days per year excluding holidays etc. 6 to 12 reads per year. Plus overheads (managers, car, office, computer system, bloody ugly rugged Symbol handhold, MDMS, dealing with complaints, dog / lock control, unreadable dials). Special reads are not that uncommon - people moving house, and check reads. Keeps coming back to human error - transposed numbers, dials read in wrong order etc. Trust me, I have had to deal with this stuff (and errors from smart systems)
The cost of a smart meter is easy enough to be found online, but simple and obvious point is that in markets like Australia and NZ, companies are replacing dumb meters without any government requirement to do so. Makes economic sense to the (private) businesses that have to collect data. One side-effect of this; once a residential street is largely full of smartmeters that are remotely read, the cost of reading remaining meters manually goes up incrementally.
BTW - the spinning dial style meter uses more power than a smartmeter, but trivial in both cases.
"Of course all customers will be paying for the smart meters via their suppliers irrespective of whether they actually have one - I'm guessing the suppliers wont be encouraged to include this as a separate line item on the bills they send out".
Retailers could probably break down bills by cost centers like meter reading, but manual meter reading is more expensive and will get more expensive.
But don't think basic economic facts get into the way of complaining about technology.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
