PG&Eek!
Do you remember a couple of months ago when customers had their electric meters upgraded to “smart grid” versions, only to see their electric bills double or triple? And then, when customers complained, do you remember how the electric companies told them that it wasn’t due to meter malfunctions, it just happened to be cold outside?
Surprise! There’s more to the story.
Pacific Gas & Electric, whose lines serve a major swath of California homes and businesses, has smartened-up over 5 million electric meters since 2007. By mid-2008, they were installing 10,000 per day!
And while most of those installations probably went very smoothly, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in Chaos Theory to guess that some small number of those meters might have problems. A recent study by PG&E reveled just how many problems there were:
- Accuracy: 8 of the 5.5 million meters installed so far were found to not measure electric use accurately.
- Communication problems: 9,000 meters had trouble connecting with the wireless network.
- Data storage: 11,376 meters measured customer usage data correctly but did not retain it.
- Human error: 23,000 meters were not installed properly.
It’s unclear how many of the 5.5 million meters they actually surveyed to find these faults. While these errors may be the insult, the injury has really been the utilities’ reluctance to communicate intelligently with customers.
“Up until now, PG&E’s basic message has been ‘We are 100 percent right, and our customers are 100 percent wrong,’ ” said Mark Toney, executive director of consumer advocacy group TURN, The Utility Reform Network. “Today they acknowledged some widespread technology problems, which is what they should have done in the first place.”
In the end, no one should be surprised that hardware and software sometimes malfunction. The surprise will come when a utility company respects its customers enough to see them as something slightly more valuable than “load.”
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