They offer some direct advantage, for instance i had Octopus Agile in the old place, a ToU tariff which varies based on wholesale pricing at 30min intervals. If theres an abundance of power, the rate goes down, even negative sometimes - yep they actually pay you to use electricity... If power is constrained, the price goes up.
'Smart' meter technology certainly offers the potential of such direct advantages to customers but (a) few suppliers currently offer such tariffs and (b) there are no guarantees that they would offer advantages (rather than disadvantages) to the customer. On the contrary, one of the greatest fears of those who are 'anti' these meters (and associated potential tariffs) is that such tariffs could result in the cost of electricity becoming much higher at the times of day when they most want/need (quite possibly 'unavoidably') to use electricity.
Hence, even when such tariffs become more widespread, there is no guarantee that such will represent a financial advantage, rather than disadvantage, to any particular customer.
For me this generally works out better than Economy7 type tariffs. Theres an expensive area around 4-7pm every day, so not ideal if your doing a lot of electric cooking etc during that time, but even with that, it still works out pretty favourably on average for us.
Fair enough. I realise that it would not be possible for a lot of people, but we have managed to adjust our lifestyle and practices such that, even without any electrical heating, we are doing pretty well with E7, generally achieving around 50% off-peak usage, at an annual saving of £200-£300 in comparison with a single-rate tariff.
But they also offer the suppliers advantages, which will filter thru in terms of cost savings. If you dont need to pay a guy to come and read the meter, you can operate your business more cheaply. Similarly if your billing is more accurate, and your not having people run up big debts due to inaccurate estimated reads etc, then again, operating the business gets cheaper.
The two suppliers of which I have experience (E.on and ESB) seem to have more-or-less given up on 'meter readers', even though I do not have a 'smart' meter. Looking back, it's about 7 years since we last saw a meter reader (even when we changed suppliers about 2 years ago) - so the only 'non-customer' reading they will have during that 7 year period will be when we had a 'routine' meter change (to a non-'smart' meter) about 3 years ago.
Interestingly, not only has no attempt been made to 'force' a 'smart' meter onto me, but they have not even offered me one (even when they did their 'routine' meter change). That may be because they already knew/suspected that if they tried to get connection from my house to a mobile phone network, they would probably have been disappointed.
In fact, the meter I do have is potentially 'smart'. It certainly has multiple ToU registers, the main thing it is lacking (which is an 'optional extra' for the meter I have) being the communications module.
I suspect these advantages will begin to become apparent as the network gets "smarter", but its a bit chicken/egg currently.
At least from the point of view of the suppliers (and 'energy conservation'), I suspect that the greatest potential benefit (and one which the 'anti' people probably fear the most!) will not come until there is widespread deployment of 'smart appliances' with which 'smart' meters can communicate and which they can 'control'. However, far from being 'widely deployed', I have not personally seen evidence that any yet even exist - so, given the lifespan of such things, I imagine that it's likely to be decades (almost certainly beyond my lifetime) before there is any hope of that 'widespread deployment' happening!
Kind Regards, John
