IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 52

the partitioning of the perceptions
of sustainability research groups,
industry, government, and end-user
interests, and to the obscuring of
governance caused by the intermediation of retail and distributor competition and their commercial goals.
Studies of the effects of enhancing the contestability of the oftentroubled relationships between
energy suppliers and end-user considerations would be beneficial,
and could shed light on regulatory
capacity constraints that might currently make increased contestability appear to be infeasible. There is

now starting to emerge. The
way in which different segments of the population can
be engaged, and how they will
respond to interventions, also
merits further investigation.
The key questions concern
getting consumers' attention,
motivating them to take action
and providing them with the
necessary knowledge and
resources."[14].
It should be noted that Ofgem
concluded that gas and electricity smart meter user responses

The microdata available from smart
metering is potentially the most
valuable single commodity created
as a consequence of its installation.
also a very real risk of abuse of the
increased information power and
control. Such increased information
will be possible via smart meter data
that will reside with energy suppliers
in a smart meter smart grid context
[12]. Further and more broad-based
work is clearly needed.
Most studies to date have treated
demand side issues essentially as a
load balancing issue for the smart
grid, with the ability to shed load at
the individual device level included
without any consideration of consumer perspectives. This is an
issue that is rising in importance
for many reasons. Even the largescale studies done for U.K. Ofgem
recently concluded:
"It is becoming clear that electricity and gas consumption
are not affected in the same
way but the details are only
2
The closest that the U.K. gets, even for nondomestic consumers, is "examining whether
specific provisions are required for non-domestic
consumers or third parties providing services to
them, to access their data" [13].

52

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to information are genuinely different. Australia and the U.K. (in
particular) "consulted widely with
stakeholders" but almost entirely
(and explicitly) excluded end-user
consumers.2 Yet significant comments about demand response
assumptions in cost benefit analyses are made repeatedly in both
countries' official analyses. In the
U.S. National Action Plan not a
single end-user consumer submission was received [7].
The broad intent of smart metering is to enable greater information
to be available to all parties and
particularly to enable the smart
grids to function. The extent to
which the capacity to manage
demand through variable pricing
by time and by load-based pricing
and - at second order - to enable
the real-time response of consumers, is still not well understood.
Improved information provision
to households, even restricted to

3
University of Munster tests http://www.metering.com/node/20028.

aggregate levels, can allow consumers to reduce their power usage.
This is a very different stance
from implementing specific shutdown of individual devices (enabled
by full smart-meter implementations). This question is part of the
privacy and control problem that is
engaged by the provision of Home
Access Networks and the bidirectional communications capacities
of smart meters capable of managing identified domestic devices.
Until home automation and individual device addressability is fully
implemented, and until the necessary deployment of home readouts
(allowing real-time monitoring of
utilization and home-based generation) has been evaluated, the
full implications of the cross connections between privatized power
generators, home storage, and home
living and transparency will not
emerge into the public eye.

Non-Price Issues
Early analyses of energy utilization
highlighted the socially regressive
nature of most domestic energy
pricing mechanisms [10].
These are not the sole impacts,
and some of the others may be categorized as follows:
1) Loss of control over home
devices,
2) Privacy,
3) Security vulnerability,
4) Uncertainty over the prices to
be levied at any given time.
Recent tentative Australian
official recognition of consumers
concerns over the data were partial [15] but at least a start. Privacy
and data linkage and exploition are
sleeping giants in this domain. The
microdata available from smart
metering is potentially the most
valuable single commodity created
as a consequence of its installation.
Several sources have reported
that the of bi-directional meters
that deliver a rapid stream of real
time data can be used to fingerprint

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SPRING 2014
http://www.meter http://www.ing.com/node/20028
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014
