The Energy Saving Trust's blog

Smart Meters or Dumb Citizens?

 

After doing a little research for this blog it became clear that not everyone is aware of the difference between smart meters and energy monitors.Whilst I suspect most of you are I thought I would give you a brief explanation for those who don’t before discussing the potential benefits and draw backs of smart meters.

Energy Monitors are hand held or table top gadgets that estimate your electricity usage in real-time. They are designed to make you aware of your electricity usage with the goal of reducing energy consumption. They usually display cost, energy usage (in kWh) or carbon emissions. These are available now and cost approximately £40 or you can get them free from some energy suppliers and you can install them yourself.

Smart Meters are electricity and gas meters that are designed to replace your existing ones. They measure your exact usage in real time and relay it back to your energy supplier.

One immediate change and, a potential benefit of the smart meter will be that you get accurate bills based on your actual usage; but this doesn’t automatically mean a reduction in your bill, you may use a bit less than the approximate amount you are currently billed for, on the other hand you may use slightly more.

The smart meters in themselves are not smart; it is you who needs to be. The smart meter will provide you with a detailed knowledge of your electricity and gas consumption but what you do with that knowledge is up to you. Ideally you will use it to pin point those areas where you could reduce your use and then actively do so.

At the moment smart meters are not widely available and would need to be installed by your energy company. Although there are government plans to roll out smart meters and have them in every home before 2020 they may not appear on a large scale for a few years yet. It might be worth checking with your current provider what their plans are for smart metering if you are interested in getting one.

Someone in the smart metering industry recently commented that “everything in your life is becoming smarter – your car, your phone – but your house is still stupid.” So are the smart meters actually smart? Only if whoever uses them is willing to use the information they provide to reduce their energy usage. The smart meters are not instinctively smart; they cannot work out where you are using excess energy and turn the offending appliance off only that you are using excess energy. The where is something people need to work out and action for themselves. And they can do it!

Good energy and good advice

One of the four “pillars” of the Energy Saving Trust’s activity is our quality assurance endorsement. When we endorse a product or service, we put the full weight of our knowledge and research behind it, so that customers know it means they will get a good energy-saving deal.

Given our pride in this important work, we are very pleased to have expanded our field of endorsement to include advice services. This service assures consumers that energy-saving advice services meet our rigorous standard. We’re very pleased to say that our first Endorsed Advice Service client is Good Energy, with whom we entered into partnership earlier this year.

Good Energy is the only electricity company whose fuel mix is 100% renewable, generated from wind, water and sunlight. The company has 26,000 domestic and business customers, and one in 25 of their customers generates their own power.

Good Energy’s chief executive, Juliet Davenport, wrote on this blog in February:

We've worked out that our customers use around 10% less electricity than the average, and one in twenty five generates their own energy. Our job is trying to work out how much they are going to save this year.

There’s always room for improvement, and that’s why we are very excited about working closely with the fantastic people at the Energy Saving Trust. They provide high quality information on energy efficiency that is independently verified, and we are looking forward to be able to use it.

The Energy Saving Trust has a vision for our energy future that should be shared by every electricity company and consumer alike.

So we put Good Energy’s customer care, sales, operations and credit control teams through their paces, training and assessing them as rigorously as if they were our own.

In fact, here is what one Good Energy staff member had to say about it:

"Because the trainer had installed many of the energy saving devices and technologies, I felt this gave the training an extra depth and understanding of the advantages and disadvantages. Moreover I feel that I have gained an excellent applied knowledge of energy saving and the costs and savings involved. I am now happy to discuss money savings, costs and installation processes for all types of energy efficiency products and I feel that I can offer our customers a much better service because of it.”

Another one said:

"When customers call complaining that their meter is faulty I will be able identify the real reason for their high energy consumption and avoid expensive call-outs by our engineers."

We're very pleased to give our Endorsement to Good Energy’s service. We're sure that their customers are getting the best advice on saving energy – and that’s what we’re all here for.

Little by Little!

Well you heard it here first, or at least first on this blog anyway, it is really interesting to see that Scottish & Southern Energy’s results reported today which I am pleased to say (although SSE Shareholders might not be) that due to domestic energy customers being more efficient in their use of energy that investments in extra generation have been put on hold.  I quote Ian Merchant, SSE’s boss, who underlined that “demand has stopped falling for industrial users but for domestic customers it’s still coming down because of the energy efficiency effect, not because of the economy.” It may just be a small glimmer but perhaps we can start to see the first real signs of the de-coupling of energy use from economic growth as customers realise prices are only ever going to go one way and that’s up.  With 6 million loft insulations and 7 million cavity wall insulations to complete by 2015, I take a small crumb of comfort from these reports.

Do you understand your energy bill?

Can you imagine a situation where your grocery shopping involved you having to guess the cost of food you were buying, with an accurate bill not arriving until three months later?  It may sound ludicrous and yet this is the way that the vast majority of us currently shop for our gas and electricity! Our latest Green Barometer IV research report, launched yesterday, highlighted that nearly eight out of ten Brits don’t know what they’re paying for their gas and electricity. I am not surprised – have you ever tried to read your electricity or gas meters? Normally they’re hidden away in a cupboard under the stairs, in the garage or in my case at the bottom of the food cupboard - hardly conducive for helping you to keep track of your energy usage!

Our study finds that energy bills are the most difficult for us to understand of any household bill: twice as hard as phone bills and four times as difficult as bank statements or credit card bills. This lack of transparency surrounding energy usage is one of the biggest problems holding back the UK's fight against climate change.  This is where smart meters come in. They include a portable display unit that can be taken anywhere in the house and which would allow you to monitor how much energy was being used at any time – as well as over days, weeks, or even months.

All well and good you might be thinking, but how will simply knowing energy consumption help people to save energy? Well, this is where I believe that the energy suppliers will have an important role to play. Unlike so-called clip-on displays, smart meters offer a two way communication system between the householder and the energy supplier. What does this mean? Well, it would allow the energy supplier to monitor and assess your home energy use, and then based on this they could offer tailored energy saving recommendations that were relevant to your needs and situation.

International trials, in places such as Sweden and the United States have shown smart meters offer an energy saving potential of between 5 and 10 per cent.  Even, using a conservative five per cent baseline, if everyone in the UK switched to smart meters British householders could save £1.2bn a year and the equivalent of 7.4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions – figures that can’t be ignored.

If you’d like to read the Green Barometer IV report then you can do so by clicking here.

Green Energy / Greenwash!

One of the problems with green electricity tariffs is their lack of transparency, with current EU regulations only requiring suppliers to provide details of the overall fuel mix of the electricity generated. Therefore the Energy Saving Trust, in coalition with energywatch, the National Consumer Council, the Renewable Energy Association sent a letter at the end of February to BERR Secretary, John Hutton and Defra Secretary, Hilary Benn asking them to make it a requirement for suppliers to reveal the renewable and non-renewable mix of every consumer’s energy supply (Click here to read the letter).

On a personal note, I want to see all green tariffs meet a standard that is genuinely green, comes from 100 per cent renewable sources of energy and delivers “additionality”. By that I mean customers know by signing up for a green tariff that they are helping to bring more renewable energy to the grid. If this isn’t achieved, we may need to introduce an extra label to make it clear which do and don’t meet these basic standards – such as our Energy Saving Recommended Scheme. This took away the confusion that people had when buying household products so they now know they are buying the best in class. The same should be true for green energy.