It's fair to say there's been quite a few issues with the smart meter systems. Allowing multiple different systems was also daft. Hopefully those issues have since been resolved, but problems still get reported regularly, so I'm giving them a miss for the moment.
To be fair I've worked for a number of Utility companies and never saw a new tariff or innovation get agreed /funded/rolled out that wouldn't make them more money overall even if it did have some headline 'shiny bits' for the customers.
People do seem to have this mis apprehension that the intelligent tariffs are horrendously expensive at peak times. My off peak is 7.5p and peak is 29.2p which to my mind is as good as it gets. At the end of this contract it rises to 12.5p and 40.2p the peak is still inline with other standard tariffs.
Highly unlikely, just a rumour invented and spread by conspiracy theorists.
You can indeed but not as instant as provided by a Smart Meter and not as convenient.
Neither do I but topping up the batteries mid afternoon and then running totally on battery power for the saving time is no hardship and has earned me £35 over the last couple of weeks, I'm up for that!
Surprising there are no reports of it actually happening? 3G has been reinstated by some airtime providers. A village local to me some miscreants climbed over into the transformer cage and threw the breaker, plunging the local area into darkness so it's not just potentially smart meters that leave you vulnerable to darkness.
There really is nothing to fear in my experience.
They still have to follow the legal process, the end user will have had plenty of warning i.e. final demands etc.
I dont see why that would be implemented.
And you think that these customers wont have had any letters requesting payment or contact? I dont think so. Why let truth get in the way of a good hard luck news story eh?
It beggars belief that the initial role out was tied to supply companies. Smets2 though is now universal which resolves that issue.
That would of course be good business practice surely?
Which benefits all of the customers except the ones that were stealing electricity.
they'll only have to follow their own internal precedures... no outside involvement who could assess situation independantly until after the damage is done etc
easy... frequency drops if there is more demand than supply, and everytime there is more demand than supply on pretty much anything the price goes up....
in many cases then yes, there will have been plenty contact and demands to get payment etc, however there are also cases where the supplier is the one who's screwed up...
if you're wanting to steal electric, then a smart meter isn't going to stop you. might limit your options but definatly wont stop you
Surely they would switch loads off if we got close to this rather than dropping frequency and everything flat out.
Absolutely, the smart meter however should reduce the ability of the supplier to make mistakes.
The ability to turn the supply off is what I'm referring to, the people that use the supply and refuse to pay, not the ones that bypass the meter.
From reading various threads on the internet, it seems they make more mistakes. Just look at the number of people having issues with E7 billing and timing issues.
if there is a major problem then yes, areas will start getting cut off, that's what happened a few years ago, few power stations tripped within a short timeframe, demand was much higher than supply so the network grid done exactly what it was supposed to do and start disconnecting areas to remove demand until there was adequate generation, which meant some areas were off, but at least the entire grid didn't fail like what happened in america a while back...
and is that because it's a smart meter? - NO is it because the system has been incorrectly configured - YES
