OneGuyFromBarlick

I got very disillusioned with smart meters when BG fitted one to the church a couple of years ago and when the church changed providers the new company couldn't read it remotely. Makes me think the technology is a long way short of fit for deploying en masse. Meanwhile you can read my meters from the top link in my signature and they aren't "smart".....

In BG's defence I have to say that the free smart meter installation they did for me (My name was pulled out of the hat, they contacted me) has worked well. The only thing I question is the fact that they don't charge me for what I have used but still work on the older principle of averaging the DD payments for summer and winter out. Apart from that, all seems to be OK. No complaints.....

How do the smart meters work? Is the signal by mobile phone technology or wifi/broadband or what? I can't see anything working in our house unless it's old-fashioned landline cable right up to the meter!

They have SIM cards inside them and communicate via mobile phone technology.

http://www.smsmetering.co.uk/smart-meters-overview/

I wonder which mobile networks the energy companies use or whether they even have their own network. Vodaphone and EE are useless here, only O2 gives a signal. Many of the holiday cottages we visit have no signal. We prefer to stick with our present method of the man coming to read the meter or them asking us for the reading. We don't trust them to do a reliable remote reading. Mind you, we'd be pleased to have smart technology simply to measure usage for our own purposes.

Have you seen the trouble about Scottish Power over-billing lots of people by 100s of pounds and failing to correct the errors? The `victims' repeatedly contact SP but get a different person answering every time who has no knowledge of their previous phone calls. They promise to sort it but nothing happens. Then they send in the debt collectors to collect the non-existent debt.

I hate scare stories like that! BG made a mistake and overcharged me but they informed me before I had recognised it and refunded the money. Can you wonder I stay loyal to them and don't run round chasing cheaper prices? I seem to remember Scottish Power making me an offer I couldn't refuse not long ago. Guess what....

Pluggy, download this Radio 4 Money Box episode, you'll find it interesting. It was broadcast about the same time as we've been discussing smart meters. LINK

"On Money Box with Lesley Curwen: new improved energy smart meters will be rolled out later this year. We'll see our energy use and its exact cost - doing away with the need for estimated bills. But just who benefits from the £11bn project? The costs will be borne by consumers who in return get projected savings of £26 a year off their energy bills. It's expected there will be new tariffs as well - called Time of Use tariffs. We are likely to be paying far more for our energy during peak periods in the early evening. Meanwhile energy will be cheaper overnight and during the morning. Will customers be flexible enough to radically change when they use gas and electricity to save money? Lesley Curwen and a panel of experts discuss the issues. Smart meters - smart or dumb?

"Joining Lesley Curwen are: Sacha Deshmukh, Chief Executive of Smart Energy GB; Stephen Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Greenwich; and Rosie McGlynn, director of new energy service from Energy UK."

The church didn't get a remote display anyway so that aspect of them isn't really of interest (they tend to be bluetooth and only work within 10 metres of the meter anyway, it would be 3 or 4 times that distance from the meter to the office). It was the remote reading bit with no need to read it and no estimated bills that was of interest. So we have a smart meter, no remote display and still have estimated bills. A great success all round then. Hell, and that's without going down the conspiracy theorists road....

To be fair, the churches meter is 3 phase and 3 rates.

Having solar panels and/or other micro-generation tends to confuse the issue and many present smart meters won't handle it, so its going to an over-whelming success at home too.

It wouldn't make too much difference to my setup as it doesn't depend on the Import (the meter the energy companies want to read), it only reads the generation meter and another meter I've put in that measures what we're using. The import figures are done mathematically.

I don't think the bills are estimated with smart meters Pluggy, what I think is happening is that they are still averaging payments as they always did before but using accurate information from the 30 minute readings. As for Time Tariffs if they happen, being an early bird I will not be hit with that!
Higher energy prices are a fact of life these days and there is a thriving industry in chattering about them. The bottom line is that due to the way energy policy has been handled politically in the UK we are now at the mercy of mega corporations and have no control whatsoever. I can remember the days of the Corporation gas and electricity and the Brave New World of nuclear when it was going to be 'too cheap to meter'. I still have to manage my own consumption and pay the bill. Coats have to be cut to suit the cloth and that has never changed. The only way this will change is if we ever get to be a an economy where proper living wages are paid for work. Don't hold your breath!

No, they are still being estimated unless we provide readings. The suppliers have told us outright that they can't read the meter and the readings on the bills reflect this. Its a variable payment depending on how much we used in the month, it got left 7 months since the last readings and they had got quite a way out.

On that Money Box programme they talked about countries that had tried smart meters and ditched them or were having too much trouble with them. But Italy have set it up to do remote reading via the power lines, like our domestic Powerline broadband signals, and this is said to be fully successful.

I see on the FT front page today that nuclear engineers at EDF are demanding that the company delays Hinckley by another two years because they believe the reactor design is not suitable yet.

BG seem to have no trouble with my readings, no meter readers since they were installed for gas and leccy.
I listened to that report as well Tiz. What struck me was that it looks as though the politicians are ignoring the engineers and in addition seem to be moving towards scrapping the original condition that Hinkley Point could not be initiated until at least one of the two similar reactors in France and Finland were up and running. We could be looking at the genesis of the biggest contractual cock-up ever!

We had a chat this morning with the man who is responsible for the new Hinckley C site (as one does) and asked him how it's going (or not going, as the case may be). He mentioned the meeting that's coming up in a couple of week's time to make the final decision and said "It has to go ahead", it's as simple as that, we have no choice. He came here from Dungeness 6 years ago and has been battling ever since, held back by the government's love affair with gas. His view is that the government would rather rely on Vladimir Putin to supply us with gas. His concern is about what happens between now and when Hinckley C comes on stream. I asked him if he expected the lights to go out. His Answer? "Yes". And to confirm that view you only have to see the big pile of logs in his garden and the PV panels on his roof.

He's got the picture.... I am seriously considering a small generator as well as my other preparations.....

We also talked about safety, not just of nuclear power stations but of H.E. dams etc. He's an engineer and agrees that one of the problems has been the shortage of good engineers in recent times. It's not the technologies that are unsafe but the way they are used that can result in problems. I mentioned the Fukushima reactor being built on a tectonic subduction zone. He said that if you go to Fukushima you can see a wall with a mark showing the level reached in the last tsunami previous to the recent one and before the reactor was built. It's a shock to see that the level of the mark is higher than the last tsunami reached, the one that devastated the reactor. It's an even bigger shock to realise they went ahead with building the nuclear power station with the knowledge of that earlier tsunami. I see a similar problem with the food industry - not enough technologists in the companies, and the ones who are there are over-worked and under-trained. The latest figures for campylobacter food poisonings in the UK are 280,000 a year, with about 100 people dying. When I worked in a food company in the 1980s I thought it was bad then, with around 100,000 poisonings a year (but it was salmonella then, rather than campylobacter).

Not surprising Tiz when you realise that people like Thatcher thought the old fashioned skills and industries were redundant and the market allied to the service industries was all we needed to run 'The New Economy'.

His words were "We've lost a generation of engineers". Part of that was due to the brain drain caused by financial institutions offering fabulous salaries to the best science, tech and engineering graduates to lure them into dreaded `City'.

I know I'm old fashioned but there is a lot to be said for anything where you are using your hands and getting them dirty. That was the route into engineering as I knew it as a lad but all the studies show that it isn't popular these days. A group of five of us from SGS met for a fifty year reunion and found that all of us had gone into proper engineering bar one who was a manager for an oil company using engineering knowledge. Perhaps it was train-spotting what did it.....



Heaton Mersey motive power shed. One of our favourite haunts and nobody ever threw us out. They used to give us rides up the yard to the coal bunker on the footplate..... No wonder we all grew up wanting to be engine drivers! I used to watch them pouring iron when I was in my pram outside Hollindrake's Foundry in Prince's Street in Stockport. It was the main shopping street in the town and had a foundry on it!

Some better news in The Guardian on the progress of Hinckley C...
"Engineers working in France’s nuclear power industry have issued an impassioned defence of EDF’s £18bn plan to build two reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset".
We are convinced that EDF is able to build and deliver the two Hinkley Point reactors on time,” they said, pointing out that the Hinkley reactors would be the fifth and sixth of their kind, benefiting from previous experience. “Hinkley Point is politically, economically and industrially, one of the most significant projects of our time,” they said. “Working with our British colleagues is an additional motivation because we and our supply chain will emerge stronger and able to compete internationally. “Like all projects of that magnitude, there are uncertainties, but it is our job to manage these. We are confident in our ability to succeed,” the letter concludes. The open letter follows the recent leak of a note blanche – the French term for an unsigned memo – suggesting even engineers believe the projected completion date of 2025 should be put back by two years.

The report also explains the modifications made to the Hinckley design to overcome the problems EDF encountered with the Flamanville plant. It also points out that "Around 60 French expatriate staff employed on the Hinkley project have previously worked on Flamanville, giving them some insight into what obstacles might arise." Guardian report

PR, don't you love it! I'm a simple minded bugger and these shenanigans don't interest me. Who in their right mind would finance a project this size when the two already being built are not yet running. End of story. All the fine words and statements in the world can't alter this simple fact. Buy candles!

The future of Hinckley Point and our energy security? It's gone into the hands of the French and Chinese governments. EDF now hasn't enough money and would have to be bailed out by the French government, who make a show of saying it has to go ahead. Will they or won't they? And will the Chinese keep their nerve or are they pondering an exit from the deal? Whatever happens, Britain won't have much say in it.

I can't imagine a bigger cock-up.....

The Hinkley Point decision is now delayed until September. EDF has to raise 4 billion euros and is going to consult the unions which means giving them 60 days notice. LINK

And just to concentrate minds, today is the 30th anniversary of Chernobyl.....

...and it's worth looking back at the causes of the incident. This from the Nuclear Energy Institute:
The accident, which occurred in the early morning of April 26, 1986, resulted when operators took actions in violation of the plant’s technical specifications. Operators ran the plant at very low power, without adequate safety precautions and without properly coordinating or communicating the procedure with safety personnel. The four Chernobyl reactors were pressurized water reactors of the Soviet RBMK design, or Reactor BolshoMoshchnosty Kanalny, meaning “high-power channel reactor.” Designed to produce both plutonium and electric power, they were very different from standard commercial designs, employing a unique combination of a graphite moderator and water coolant. The reactors also were highly unstable at low power, primarily owing to control rod design and “positive void coefficient,” factors that accelerated nuclear chain reaction and power output if the reactors lost cooling water.

These factors all contributed to an uncontrollable power surge that led to Chernobyl 4’s destruction. The power surge caused a sudden increase in heat, which ruptured some of the pressure tubes containing fuel. The hot fuel particles reacted with water and caused a steam explosion, which lifted the 1,000-metric-ton cover off the top of the reactor, rupturing the rest of the 1,660 pressure tubes, causing a second explosion and exposing the reactor core to the environment. The fire burned for 10 days, releasing a large amount of radiation into the atmosphere. The Chernobyl plant did not have the massive containment structure common to most nuclear power plants elsewhere in the world. Without this protection, radioactive material escaped into the environment.

The crippled Chernobyl 4 reactor now is enclosed in a concrete structure that is growing weaker over time. Ukraine and the Group of Eight industrialized nations have agreed on a plan to stabilize the existing structure by constructing an enormous new sarcophagus around it, which is expected to last more than 100 years. Officials shut down reactor 2 after a building fire in 1991 and closed Chernobyl 1 and 3 in 1996 and 2000, respectively. NEI
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Here is an even more detailed description of events, written by a photographer who has visited and recorded the site. Other pages on his site have a gallery of his photos... Chernoby