EU, UK Mandate 'Smart Meters,' Home Energy Ratings
by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, St. Louis, MO on 07.28.06
Some hybrid car drivers tell us that they get a real kick out of watching the display of their current gas mileage that comes with many of these cars, and trying to beat it by changing their driving habits. The European Union seems to believe that this kind of motivation may work with homeowners, too, and has mandated that "smart meters" be used as replacements when existing home energy meters have served out their useful life. British blogger David Slocombe notes that this EU mandate coincides with a new UK law requiring all British homes to have an energy rating at the time of their sale. Between the two, Slocombe believes that not only individual competitiveness, but old fashioned market forces, will compel Brits to conserve energy at home:
...these energy usage ‘touchpoints’ could provide a few ways that home owners or renters are ‘influenced’ to save energy, firstly house prices will react to the energy rating If we consider that its a buyers market then buyers will use lower energy ratings to haggle property prices down. ...David's not just theorizing here: a designer of eco-friendly products, he's built his own smart meter (pictured above), and reports that it has increased his awareness of the energy consumed by common activities ("microwaving a cold coffee uses shockingly high amount of energy but only briefly"), and inspired him to make changes to more efficient products around his home.Secondly the home efficiency rating will provide a quantifiable means for home owners to increase the market value of a property by, for example, installing energy efficient appliances and insulating loft cavities thus improving their efficiency rating. A warning sign here though is that renovation methods are likely to favour energy saving methods that are ‘portable’ such as saving energy through new appliances that can be taken away when leaving a property and installed to save energy at the next. In general this trend will lead to the market levelling off and growing again leaving the impact of the UK energy efficiency drive as a price ‘dip’ not a crash. Of course, energy efficient product sales will rise and should be supported by labelling schemes such as product energy labelling (which is unfortunately not flawless) and the 1 watt initiative.
We like both of these ideas, as they directly tie monetary value, both in terms of utility bills and home value, to the range of activities we engage in daily that use power. Homeowners not only gain greater control over energy use with the knowledge they receive, but also recognize that exercising that control impacts their wallets. For most of us, that's all the motivation we need... ::phicons.com
In the organizational development consulting world, awareness is a big deal: "if you don't measure it, you can't improve it."
I don't have the reference, unfortunately, but a national health care system (either Canada's or the UK's, I believe) performed an experiment. They told patients the cost of every procedure as they were explaining the patient's options, doing their best not to introduce any bias.
The interesting thing they found was that the average cost of health care for this group over the period of the study was lower than the control group, which wasn't told the cost. (The types of issues dealt with was made roughly equivalent.)
This is particularly interesting because inside the these health care systems the patient doesn't pay a penny out of pocket. In other words, they don't pay no matter if they choose the more expensive procedure.
If you keep an ear open, you'll hear about these kinds of results from time to time. Give people the tools to assess their options, and, on average, usage and costs tend to go down.
So, as far as I know, the only "smart meter" available domestically in the US is the Energy Detective, which looks a little limited in the features dept. (particularly logging and network connection for better viz and analysis)
Does anyone know of any others?
Firstly, big thanks to treehugger for posting my article! I have a small correction, I do design smart energy products but the energy meter pictured I used as part of my research, it is manufactured by http://www.electrisave.co.uk. In answer to the previous comment, there is another boutique studio in the UK that sells the Wattson, a kind of ambient displays version of the wattmeter - you can find them here: http://www.diykyoto.com/.
I will post some details of how to build your own in the near future if there is interest!
Dave, thanks for the links!
Energy meter build details would be awesome.