I agree that it is unlikely. This misses my point, though:
The smart meter doesn’t have to transmit at a high rate. It can sample the power at whatever rate the processor is capable of, millions of times per second if desired, and locally distill the information down to high-level events like “the dryer was used for X time interval”. Then, transmit only the high-level information over the network (as well as the per-hour usage). It should take well under a kilobyte per day to describe all the power events in a typical household (especially if you ignore the smaller ones like flipping a light switch).
That would be my impression too - that they guess based on typical use. It can’t tell a dishwasher drying cycle from a dryer cycle. Have the hot water tank kick in (mine’s electric) - or late dinner - it has no idea.
This whole thread has been about HOW the power company calculates these numbers. What I want to know is WHY they are sending you this report.
What do they get out of it? Are they trying to sell you more energy-efficient appliances?
I’d love to know if anyone has tried suing them. Suppose someone does do their laundry there, and the numbers are far higher than what they were led to believe by the yellow sticker on the washer/dryer that they purchased. So they go out and buy an even more efficient one, only to find that the usage report remains unchanged. I’d be pretty angry if that happened to me.
There is a proposal here in the UK to bill us at different rates for the time of day or night. Essentially, they want to encourage us to use Washing machines and dishwashers etc at times when the grid is least used. Probably between midnight and six am.
I’m not the OP, but this post reminded me that I filled out a questionnaire from my utility company like that. As I recall the questions were along the lines of “How old is your air conditioner?” “How many lights in your home are incandescent/fluorescent/LED?” and stuff like that. I bet they can get reasonably accurate estimates of how much energy I’m using for what based on that information.
Maybe not sell, but it’s good for the power company if customers are energy efficient. Energy efficient homes means less load on the grid, which is especially important during peak hours and weather events. Energy providers can qualify for federal incentives if they work on reducing overall power generation. Lower utility bills means happier customers. And so on.
So a report that gets somebody thinking about their usage is good for the power companies. Maybe they get more energy-efficient appliances, maybe they get a thermographic inspection (these are often free from power companies or nonprofits) and figure out they can save a bunch of money if they make some fixes to their windows, whatever. Less power usage is good for everyone.
AFAIK, American utilities got out of the appliance selling side-business many decades ago. That wouldn’t fly with any of the state regulatory committees today.
They do hope that the numbers will nudge people into buying more energy-efficient appliances or switch time of use to lower rate periods or just remember to turn stuff off instead of leaving everything on all day long. Complaints about high bills are ubiquitous so any lowering effect they get is to everybody’s advantage. Less usage also means that fewer new plants need to be built, again to everybody’s advantage.
Suing is out of the question. Bill formats are dictated by the state commissions and every word on them has to be approved. The state knows how consumption numbers are figured and has said it’s OK. States have sovereign immunity except in extremely unusual cases, and an electric bill wouldn’t be one of them.
Are the notices required at some level of utility regulation? Because while I agree that it is a net good for everyone if we use less electricity, the specific entity that it’s probably not that good for is the company that sells us the electricity, right?
Generally suppliers of goods go out of their way to encourage their customers to purchase more of their goods, not help them figure out ways to cut back.
Or is there some way that lower use actually helps the utility because their specific economic model is different?
I have gotten the impression that electricity suppliers are different from all others because of the hell they go through when over-demand causes a blackout.
When a storm knocks the power lines out, that’s the sort of disaster that can affect any industry, and the way to work on preventing it is by strengthening the infrastructure. But the best way to fight the load caused by air conditioning on a hot summer day is by convincing the customers to use less electricity. So yes, they really do want us to cut back.
They’d probably rather avoid the expense of building out infrastructure to increase demand which would have a long ROI. They may also be forced to do those things by regulatory agencies.
Utilities are put into a special class and regulated by the government because of their universal necessity. The New York State Public Utilities Commission regulates Natural Gas, Electricity, Steam, Telecommunications, and Water. (Telecommunications includes telephone, two-way radio, VoIP, and Cable, but not television or other content providers or cable content.)
The battle between the companies who want to sell more of their product and the PUC which wants bills to be lower is perpetual. Annual rate cases start on January 1, get argued through December 31, and then restart on the next day. (OK, not really, but it seems like that.) The PUC tells utilities that they can earn x% of profit and no more; the utilities have to figure out how to do so, while not violating any of the million strictures the PUC levies.
It’s a terrible business model. Mostly it gives utilities incentives to cut staff and services. Rapacious international hypercompanies have bought up most of the local utilities and slash them past the bone. They’re headquartered in other countries and don’t care about customer complaints or that staff flee at the first possible retirement age and new hires have no experience in an industry everybody reviles. And the PUC is horribly underfunded and understaffed. And governors also set impossible environmental goals every year, which they then modify every year. And a dozen more ands.
Nevertheless, customers do complain and numerous activist groups testify at every rate hearing, usually to ask for bills to be cut and services vastly expanded. I imagine they also ask for unicorns farting strawberries but I’ve only heard rumors.
Individuals can and do make individual complaints. I don’t know what state @Keeve is in, but every state has an equivalent to the PUC under a different name. A list with links can be found here. 50 states mean 50 sets of rules so I can’t give any advice. Your state will have its complaint procedure on its website.
Very, very simplified explanation but the electricity we get from the power company is A/C - rather than a constant voltage, it ‘alternates’ from positive to negative voltage at regular intervals, 60 times a second (or 60Hz) for the US, 50Hz for Europe, and Japan actually does both 60Hz/50Hz depending on which side of the country you’re on.
For purely resistive loads, e.g. an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb (technically, LED lightbulbs aren’t purely resistive, but they’re pretty close), voltage and current will be phase locked. That is, if you measured the current and voltage waveforms, they’d alternate in lock-step (peak current occurs at peak voltage).
There are also things called ‘reactive’ loads, usually things with capacitors and inductors. Anything with a motor is basically going to be an inductive load, which is a type of reactive load. For those, especially when they start up, if you look at the current and voltage waveforms, the phases of the current and the voltage won’t line up, i.e. the peak of the current waveform will lag behind the peak of the voltage waveform.
That difference in phase can be seen by the system, especially when a motor is starting up. So, big draws, like A/C or refrigerators or such, can be detected. But as many posters here can attest, while those spikes can be detected, exactly what is creating them generally can’t be deduced with any great precision.
I got an email a few days ago from our power company with similar information and dug into it.
They explicitly say that they use machine learning to identify different uses.
In my case, I think they really did. Their info showed a good chunk of energy in the “cooling” category over the last few months, which surprised me because while we were running the air conditioner 2 and 3 months ago, it hasn’t been hot enough to run it in the last month. So I started investigating.
We had some bad smoke here last month, so we had turned on the HVAC fan so it would run air through our house filter more, and we had left it on. I went out and looked at the meter with it on and off, and sure enough: running the fan the whole time was pretty close to what they estimated for cooling in the last month.
So apparently their algorithm is smart enough to figure out an HVAC fan, even with the AC off.