California decides on data access and privacy standards for smart meter data
The theory behind “consumer-driven demand response” for the Smart Grid is that if residential and business electricity customers can track what their energy usage is and see how energy prices vary based on the time of day, then consumers will both curtail energy usage and shift our usage to less expensive times of the day. That’s the theory. In practice, we don’t get a lot of information available from our smart meters.
One reason is privacy concerns: For example. if the bad guys can get access and track your energy usage then they can guess when you won’t be home and burgle your house.
Yesterday the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued its order, “A Decision Adopting Rules to Protect the Privacy and Security of the Electricity Usage Data of the Customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Company.” (Available here as a 170pp PDF from the CA PUC website.)
Here’s a nice summary (via SmartGridNews) of the requirements the order places on California’s three top utilities to make power usage available to consumers (and any third-party apps consumers request):
• Provide customers with detailed energy usage, bill-to-date, month-end bill forecast, and projected month-end energy price on their websites, updated daily
• Provide “tier alerts” via some form of rapid communication (email, tweets, etc.) when customers move from one price tier to the next
• Provide a website calculator to help consumers determine if they would save money by switching to a time-of-use rate
• Allow consumers to authorize third parties to receive their backhauled smart meter data directly from the utility
• Set up a program to roll out home area networking devices to be directly connected with smart meters
Many young companies have sprung up based on being able to access consumers’ Smart Meter data and package it in some meaningful form. So far they’ve had to make their own assumptions about what data wuold be available, often forming alliances between hardware and software companies. (A couple of examples: The Data Detective and People Power.) In general California seems to set the bar for energy regulation at the state level and we can probably take yesterday’s PUC order as a template for smart meter data going forward.
Byron commented:
The so-called SMART meters are a progressive attempt to monitor, manipulate, and control individual behavior in the US. When viewed against other Federal law (e.g. NDAA, CISPA, Agenda 21, etc) one realizes that the SMART meter is an incremental attempt to bring prople under the "spy eye" of the Feds. Benefits are public propoganda-the meters serve their Masters to restrict choices we have in our lives-the meters should be banned and anything Owebama madates should be viewed in the proper light-to transform the United States from Socialism to Fascism.
American Patriot commented:
Can we request our old meters back. I understand these smart meters emit a lot of radiation. This we do not need.
Alex Pummer commented:
California's power companies, nothing would surprise me, except they would think before they
"shoot", but don't worry that never will happen since, here nobody does something wrong, accident just happen on his own.
Simonts commented:
I see no "consumer protection" in the summary of this PUC order. "Allow customers to authorize" is the usual wrong formulation, which shows that PUC is in the pockets of PG&E and its ilk. The right formulation for consumers would be: "you can not share any consumer data without the express written permission of the consumer". Anything less is window dressing. Furthermore, there should be serious consequences of any data breach due to negligence or incompetence of PG&E, with exponentially increasing mandatory fines. Finally there should be very severe fines for disconnecting consumers without justification.
Just_a_Regular_Guy commented:
I'm wondering how secure the control pathways for these meters are? If one were a terrorist, they could wreak a lot of havoc by hacking in and randomly turning off thousands of people's power using the remote disconnect feature of these Smart meters. The instability caused by shedding all these loads could also add to the fun. I lot of effort has gone into protecting power plants, but what about all the exposed "smart grid" and "smart meter" infrastructure?
Carmen commented:
It is just another gimmik to let PG&E have the edge on consumers. The need monies to make up for all of their huge mistakes around the state. They need a good financial manager who will tell them how to cut costs within their organization versus on how to rape the public who keep them in business. They need a "smart meter" in the upper management and their quality control of their work.
TheMANwithnoName commented:
Most smart meter discussions outside the power business trade journals fail to mention perhaps the major benefit of smart meters - the ability of the utility to turn electric service off and on without sending out a live person to the service address. So eveytime they turn off service for nonpayment ($25 fee here) and then turn it back on when the customer finally rushes to the office with a payment ($45 to reconnect) those charges change from being barely a break even proposition to being a profit center. Don't get me wrong. I see some advantage in being able to control loads remotely if it means saving the cost of building another electric plant (especially if it is a nuke) to satisfy peak demands. But make no mistake, the only ones who directly benefit from smart meters are smart utility companies.
TheMANwithNoName commented:
I don't have time to read 170ppg of government doublespeak, but I don't see anything in the summary that protects anyone's privacy but the electric company. Certainly nothing there that keeps 'burglers from looking at energy readings to see if anyone is home'. (give me a break)
William Ketel commented:
How many users are actually going to ever look at their meter for any reason, ever? The two real advantages to the smart meter are the telemetry feature, which replaces meter readers, and the ability ti raise the price during the periods of peak demend, neother of these is a way of reducing consumption. The privacy solution is so easy that it is trivial, which is to only send the data once a month. That makes using the data to determine "somebody not at ome" impossible. Of course, paying more will possibly reduce consumption by some folks.
David W commented:
Like it or not, smart meters are coming. They are a cost reducing by reducing the need for as many meter readers. They can reduce meter tampering. They can be abused as can many modern inventions. We need to have strong regulations on data access and usage along with well written software to make hacking very difficult. We also nee the utilities to be proactive in defending the system against hacking.
Cheaper_Ideas commented:
As pointed out, most remetering schemes have high cost, and many privacy & potential misuse issues.
A simpler and CHEAPER -personal- solution is obtaining a cheap webcam and pointing it at your meter. Your home computer can take pics of the dials on a known schedule for later review, the images are dated automatically, and you don't have to be present to get the data. OpenCV or other open source vision program can even process the images and upload them to a spreadsheet, and IR LEDs even allow pics to be taken at night. This is MUCH cheaper solution for an individual's use, and it does not interfere with the wiring at all.
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DVanditmars commented:
Typical government types, everybody can access your data except for you, and when you are allowed to take a peak at the data it is not in realtime. The end user needs second by second realtime data to chnage their habits.
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Andy T commented:
@ jack. I think it's more likely we'll see "Robin Hack" rob from the rich and give to the poor by rewinding meters, or prescaling their readings. Fun times ahead.
Jack commented:
This is all a waste of consumer time. How does monitoring your usage help you one bit? This is a smokescreen so that the utility companies can lay the infrastructure for dynamic pricing.
Do consumers get notified when the utility uploads a new software version? How do you know the new algorithms are accurate or they don't run a shadow algorithm in the background? What happens when the grid gets hacked and everyone gets their electricity cut off?
William Ketel commented:
The simple and secure way for users to get real-time data would be a wired Ethernet link to the meter. The utility company could download their minute by minute records in a single burst, on a weekly or monthly basis.
duaneh commented:
Nothing about an 'opt-out' option???
Bal commented:
I installed a monitor from TheEnergyDetective a few years ago. This really helped my family understand their electricity usage and cost in real time - it updates every second or so. Still waiting for PG&E a smart meter that will only give data every few hours - how will that help?
Albert commented:
From People Power's page
"Service providers offer customers new sticky value-added services that generate billions of dollars"
Sounds like customers might be stuck with some additional cost$.
Mike commented:
I do not have a smart meter. every day at a specific time I go outside, read my meter visually, enter the number in excel with notes (whether I did laundry etc) and track my data my self. I don't see the need for smart meters since they only improve the info available to others, not me.
Sure they could lower my rate at times, but at what cost in the long run? Privacy? No thanks.
