'Smart' power meters herald future of our electricity use

Arrival of 'smart' power meters heralds the future of how we'll use electricity at home

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Various kinds of smart meters are available and in use around the country. Depending on its capabilities, a smart meter -- at a cost of about $200 per home -- also can play a role in how much information about energy use is made available to customers and how much money can be saved. The most advanced ones allow the utility and the customer to gauge usage and cost immediately, instead of once a month after a meter reader makes the rounds.

Utilities plan to offer a menu of rate plans. In its pilot, PPL offered something referred to as a "time-of-use" rate, where set periods of higher prices contrast with periods of lower prices. In this case, pilot participants paid more between noon and 7 p.m. on weekdays and less the rest of the time.

Some rates, called "real time," change throughout the day as the wholesale price floats up and down. People who sign up for such plans may receive signals, such as e-mails or cell phone messages, to tell them prices are climbing dangerously.

"Critical peak" rates would apply only on the dozen or more highest-demand days of the year.

So far, pilot programs have found that the average customer usually saves money. Critics note, however, that's not always the case.

In the pilot program Brubaker signed up for the past three summers, about one in four PPL customers accumulated bigger bills than they would have logged on the average rate. PPL officials chalked that up to people flying blind without enough information about how to save money, a shortcoming the utility is trying to address by things like putting a kilowatt calculator on its Web site.

In a Commonwealth Edison Co. pilot program in Illinois, the average participant paid about 7 percent more in 2005, a departure from the pilot tests of other years. Company officials blamed the increase on spiking prices during an unusually hot summer and the disruption of natural gas supplies caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Last year, about 95 percent of the participants saved money in Commonwealth Edison's open-enrollment residential real-time pricing program, thought to be the nation's first. The majority saved between 7 percent to 12 percent, the utility said. To date, about 4,000 of the utility's 3.3 million residential customers have signed up.

A brochure the utility mailed to customers advises the program might not be for them if, for instance, they don't work during the day, don't have electric heat or have a medical condition.

Some electricity consumers simply don't have much wiggle room when it comes to changing electricity consumption. For instance, families with small children who participated in an Ottawa Hydro pilot in 2006-07 later reported difficulty shaping their lives around the rates. They told surveyors that it was difficult to cut back on laundry loads during the higher-priced daytime periods.

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