Electricity utility Country Energy said this week that the due date for completion of its smart metering roll-out was 2017, despite plans to reveal the locations of a trial of the technology with IBM in the next two weeks.
A clarification was made to this story. Details are at the bottom of the article.
Electricity utility Country Energy said this week that the due date for completion of its smart metering roll-out was 2017, despite plans to reveal the locations of a trial of the technology with IBM in the next two weeks.
IBM Australia chief Glen Boreham (Credit: IBM)
"I think the technology around smart metering is moving so quickly that we have to be careful that we don't strand ourselves," Country Energy spokesperson Ben Hamilton told ZDNet.com.au at an IBM lunch focused on the technology and hosted by IBM's Australian chief Glen Boreham.
The technology around smart metering is moving so quickly that we have to be careful that we don't strand ourselves
Country Energy's Ben Hamilton
"If we're hitching to the wrong technology wagon, two years down the track it won't go anywhere near being what we would need in terms of functionality," he said.
Despite the comments, the utility is planning to launch a trial of the technology, which allows utilities to read meters and gain additional functionality remotely, in regional NSW in coming weeks. The trial was announced earlier last year.
Hamilton was unable to say what the per household cost would be if it were to roll out the technology today.
At the lunch, IBM's Boreham called Australia's current energy infrastructure dumb. "When I say 'dumb', I don't mean stupid or even poor ... I mean 'unaware'," he said. "When a system is dumb, its parts are disconnected — you can't see what's going on; the system can't respond as a whole, and you don't have the control to stop it failing."
His message echoed a plea he had made weeks ago for the Federal Government to invest some of its $42 billion stimulus package into smart metering technology for Australia.
Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy, at the CeBIT technology fair in Germany, recently flagged the government's in-principle support for such technology, dovetailing the $4.9 billion National Broadband Network roll-out with the argument for smart energy systems.
"The energy sector, service providers plan to use broadband to improve the way they monitor and manage power distribution," said Conroy. "In Australia and elsewhere, providers are already testing intelligent network technology to gain specific, real-time data on energy usage."
While IBM's Boreham said Australia urgently needed action on the issue, Country Energy's Hamilton said the reason Australia hasn't moved ahead like California, where it is possible to sell unused energy generated from alternative sources back into the grid, was because the state was "driven to it" by its energy crisis. Some of CE's customers are able to feed energy back in now, and the move to smart metering will accelerate that capability.
Director of Access Economics, Ric Simes, who also spoke at the IBM media briefing about Australia's falling productivity over the 1990s, told ZDNet.com.au that the challenge facing smart energy metering technology such as that proposed by Boreham, was that Australians were not sensitive to the price of energy.
An example of this was highlighted by Country Energy's Hamilton, who said that under its small scale trials it was children and not parents who responded to automated signals indicating that lights were left on as they were leaving the house.
This behaviour indicated a low price sensitivity to energy, according to Simes. Other initiatives that would tip the balance in favour of investing in smart energy technology included a broad-based promotions campaign and regulatory changes.
We incorrectly reported that Country Energy said this week it was unlikely to roll out smart metering within the next eight years. In fact, the utility will roll out the technology within that time, but by the due date for completion of 2017, as defined by the Ministerial Council on Energy.
