This article was taken from The WIRED World in 2016 -- our fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Let's be honest, nobody exactly loves their electricity supplier. The service is impersonal, prices skew high and estimated billing is an antiquated practice in an age when we're producing vast amounts of data. Sure, energy companies have done much to earn their bad reputations, but it's also true that the system they're dealing with has not evolved in principle since London's Edison Electric Light Station first whirred into action in 1882: power gets pumped from a central point to a large number of users, with delayed feedback about how much is being used or when. It's expensive, it's inefficient and it's fragile.


In 2016, a UK government initiative that's being billed as the biggest national infrastructure project in living memory aims to change all that. Due to complete by 2020, it will furnish 26 million homes in the UK with smart meters. The £11 billion project will be a gateway to a smart grid.

Although the implications of smart meters could prove transformative, the devices themselves are simple. They record energy consumption at regular intervals and send the data back to the supplier. In their simplest application, the meters will be used to show consumers how much power they use.

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The theory is that once users see the impact of turning on the washing machine or boiling the kettle, they will act more prudently. British Gas, for example, which will undertake installations at nine million households, won't simply present users with a high-level kilowatt-hour figure, but use algorithms to indicate which devices are guzzling the most energy. The company's trials show that these numbers alone cause bills to fall by around two per cent. The full potential of this technology, however, goes well beyond guilt.

As the country gets re-equipped, expect the proliferation of "time of use" tariffs, which vary prices throughout the day. Currently only a crude version, offering cheaper night-time power, is available to a minority of the population. Through smart meters, more sophisticated formulations can be set remotely. These could reflect the underlying costs of local or national energy -- if a period of the day is proving particularly demanding, the supplier may levy a premium to use electricity during that period, and discount power at other times. If that sounds like a potential customer-satisfaction disaster, British Gas, which trialled a similar idea with 600 users, says that the utility shared that concern. "But actually, when we spoke to customers, they got it," says Stavros Sachinis, a project manager on the company's smart-grids programme. Peak period power consumption dropped by 9.7 percent. "If you scale that up across the UK you're talking about 2.5 gigawatts of power stations that you wouldn't have to fire up."


And the expanding internet of things will spur the grid to get smarter. Imagine your washing machine is networked to your smart meter. You could set the cycle to begin only when power is cheap; alternatively -- in return for a discount from your energy supplier -- you may simply program a deadline for when you need the cycle finished and permit the machine to start when the grid isn't strained. This flexibility will become paramount in a future where electric cars line our streets. "The nightmare for the grid about electric vehicles is they're essentially double the demand of a house," Sachinis says. "So if you have a whole street of cars and their owners all get home from work at exactly the same time and plug them in, you're going to have real problems on the network." Automatically stagger the cars' charging by even a few minutes, though, and that problem's vastly assuaged.

Those vehicles may in fact become a useful component of the grid. They contain capacious batteries so could double up as storage devices, sending power back to the owner's home during peak times. Drivers who own petrol-powered cars may instead opt to buy a home battery, and a number of companies are already working on these including Siemens, Samsung, Mercedes-Benz and Tesla.

The national grid itself may become less important. We could be living in a world where consumers have super-efficient homes and are mainly generating on site Charlie Burton, WIRED contributor, commissioning editor for GQ

"Batteries are a key enabler of smart grids," Sachinis says. They will come into their own as houses generate more of their own power through solar cells: charge up the battery during the day, then run the house off it at night.

Still, might consumers not wish to sell this power back to the supplier instead of storing it up? "When you start spilling solar back on to the grid, it's actually not very good for anybody," Sachinis says. "There's this whole 'Export to the grid and get paid', but in fact you're better off if you use it yourself, because you want to offset the higher price you would have paid, rather than receive the lower price you get for export."


Washing machines with a mind of their own, cars powering houses: ideas like these are years from ubiquity. Nevertheless, in the immediate term, a host of innovations will try to give teeth to smart-meter data. Many will draw on behavioural science. The best-known pioneer in this area is Opower, which shows customers how their energy use compares to others' in similarly sized houses. And there are also set-ups such as CEIVA which, since 2001, has manufactured digital picture frames that connect to the web. In 2011, it created a new smart meter function, interpolating the usual photo stream with consumption stats and energy-saving tips that appear every 90 seconds. The idea was that the photo-frame aspect would make people happy to have it openly on display. "It's the idea of making it glance-able," says Wannie Park, CEIVA's vice president of strategic partnerships. "If you glance at it enough times, you get the information embedded in your day-to-day life."

In the further future, however, such messages might be redundant because the national grid itself may become less important. We could be living in a world where consumers have super-efficient homes and are mainly generating on site. The supplier would merely offer a system for managing the energy. "Then the grid," Sachinis says, "would simply be a backup."

Charlie Burtonis a regular WIRED contributor and commissioning editor for GQ