Why ‘Smart’ meters aren’t so smart.

When we’re not allowed access to our own data.

This originally took the form of a complaint to my energy provider, Ecotricity — who despite their claims to be an ethical provider still fail to give equal access to the data they collect.

Smart meters in their current form represent a fundamental inequality to energy consumers, where we hand over large amounts of data to our energy providers but aren’t given equal access to that same data.

One of the oft-touted advantages of smart meters is the ability to track your energy usage in real-time, and the ability to better understand your energy usage — as opposed to the old way of doing things where you’d take a meter reading each month and only then would you know what your energy usage was.

But as it currently stands — there is no way for anyone to actually use this information in any meaningful way. The in-home display (IHD) provided by energy companies is essentially useless because there’s no way to actually access the data in any sane way. If one wished to say build a spreadsheet and a set of graphs showing their energy usage the only way you could do this is to manually enter the data shown on my IHD by hand — a time consuming process and exactly the opposite of ‘smart’.

By comparison, my bathroom scales are ‘smart’ — I stand on them, and it shows a number on the scales themselves — but I can also query that data however I like and access it to do whatever I like with and I don’t have to resort to manually writing the data down. It’s just there, easily accessible to me.

Energy providers however have much better access to this data. They can query your energy usage on a 30-minute basis and put together whatever set of statistics they’d like based on this automatically.

The result is an unfair inequality in terms of access to the data. You can only use the tiny IHD to access your data and if you want to do anything useful with it you must manually process it by hand which defeats the point entirely since you can do that without a smart meter.

To resolve this inequality, energy providers should provide easy access to this data to customers in the a similar way that the providers themselves can (such as a mobile app, access via their account page with a spreadsheet download option, and tools for app developers to access that data). That way customers who want to make real use of the data can do so and app developers can build applications that leverage this to make the data gathered by smart meters accessible in new ways to become more useful to consumers.