"Automated metering" is really a misnomer. Since the meter is the current information interface between the utility and its customer, it might seem natural that the meter is the place to look for change. But, much more is a stake than metering as we modify our generation and use of electrical energy in this century.
If we step back and look at the bigger picture about how a whole system of electricity exchange might need to be managed and used, we might sense that discussing meters is a bit archaic. It is fine to talk and write about archaic technologies, but when efficiency of capital expenditures can result in an optimized electricity exchange and electricity services markets, a lot more will be demanded of the useful functions integrated into the electricity exchange industry that will replace the electric utilities we now fashion as a commodity which we merely measure as the passing of electrons and the reporting of information about when and how this is happening.
So if the reader will permit me to provide a test as to whether you believe proposed rapid and massive change is needed, you can cut off your inquiry here and let me move on to those readers who understand the climate issue as seriously and dire as I do. It is this: institutionally and politically our adaptivity is not going to be up to the task, before the tipping point of runaway heating becomes so uncontrollable and thus requirements of capital expenditure, far beyond our ability to ameliorate, that a new geological era of specie extinction oceanic and atmospheric chemical modification will crash everything we blissfully and ignorantly now assume as part of the human experience on this planet for future generations. If you don't believe this is likely or possible, stop reading here.
This is a test discussion which I will not continue to develop if the following does not develop interest:
The concept of a utility assums we can willy nilly plug and play without careful information and control associated. So the whole idea of a utility must be transformed into an exchange with ample information and control at many points of use from both supply and demand interactively and simultaneously, more or less as a single system: not something your local independent Zibbee or BlueTooth or whatever network and several proprietary non-standard interfaces at the electric meters can be later upgraded to powerfully and efficiently provide the essential integration. We cannot now afford to tie up our precious capital in a hodge podge system that later will need that capital, and more. That's the big idea.
A century ago at just about this time, Edison, and Tesla, Westinghouse and GE had the time to slug it out for system and market dominance and their separate economic and political power moves at standardization. That was good old capitalizm at its finest. It worked.
But this century, the empty frontiers of conquest are gone. There is an urgent need for a very sophisticated and massive system meant to optimize electricity (read CO2 diminsishment) usage at a level at multiples of efficiency compared to the current shoddy and disorderly system now pulsing across the land.
This is a small part of the technical challencge--the easy part. Far more imposing is the institutional framework, both public and private, that flounders at cross-purposes, competes where it should cooperate, sets off at quarterly earnings targets in a scale far out of synch with the geological epoch now forming in our biosphere, finding public instiutions such as FERC, sitting on their fannies, waiting for the short circuited political cache to reach policy favors as money channeled through the executive and legislative branches.
It's not Howdy Doody time any more and this the not Doodyville, and Finnias T. Bluster, the senile and excentric Mayor must bound from his rocking chair to bring sanity to a society asleep in a fog of electronic haze, and brace up to the wind of atmospheric and oceanic biospheric and climatalocical collapse.
Rich Patterson rpatterson19@att.net