The smart meter is a canard—a story or a hoax based on specious and grandiose claims about energy benefits ostensibly derived from the promise of “two-way” communication with the customer. Specifically, these supposed benefits are held to derive from display of energy use data, control of energy appliances, knowledge of grid load distribution, supply/demand balancing, renewable integration, lower bills, and other “hand-waving.” These energy benefits have not been delivered, or have been only minimally delivered by the meter networks. The present smart meter focus is wholly misguided for reasons that are technical, economic, privacyrelated, public health-related, and structural (i.e., related to a dysfunctional industry/market structure).
Smart meters have failed to deliver smart grid benefits for fundamentally technical reasons [including] 1) the networks do not generally provide full two-way communication, 2) customer usage display was, in most cases, of stale data (24 hour delayed) on a third-party website—on-site real-time display is not feasible using most meter backhaul networks—and 3) smart meters and their networks cannot or are ill-equipped to implement demand response load control strategies.
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| The "smart meter network market dependency pyramid" |
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