What are Smart Meters and what do they mean for you?

The European Parliament has announced that all existing electricity and gas meters are to be phased out and replaced with more high-tech Smart Meters. All EU member states will be looking to achieve a minimum of eighty per cent Smart Meter coverage by 2020.

The UK government has therefore decided that we will all have Smart Meters installed in our homes by 2020, so just what are these Smart Meters and what does this change mean for the everyday consumer?

1.The new Smart Meters are run electrically and can be fitted to gas, electric or water meters. Instead of giving an aggregate reading of your energy usage over a quarter or year like traditional meters, they provide a detailed rundown of your power usage so that you can see when you used power and what you used this power for.

2. The meters pass details of your power consumption back to your supplier so that they can monitor your power use. This means an end to estimated bills and the overcharging that can result with this method of meter reading..

3. Because information is sent directly to your supplier, energy suppliers will no longer need to pay to dispatch meter readers of their own, and hope to have less need for call centres set up to deal with customer queries about estimated bills. This all means savings for suppliers, and could lead to reduced energy rates for all of us.

4. The Smart Meter is a giant leap forward in meter reading technology, allowing users to see up-to-the-minute information on their energy consumption, and how much this is costing, on a display screen fitted within their homes. Here users can compare their usage by day, week or month to see where they are using most energy and where they can make improvements.

5. The meters can be controlled remotely by the energy suppliers who can disconnect and reconnect power remotely, as well as monitor power quality, change the maximum amount of power supplied to a customer, and change meter billing plans at the touch of a button.

Existing meters are not suitable for our future energy needs. They do not have the ability to monitor power coming from several different sources for example. Smart Meters can do this, and may have to when the world comes to rely on sustainable sources of energy more and more.

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