How Smart Meters will change our home energy use forever

The UK is now joining with the whole of Europe in changing the way that our gas and electricity is monitored. New Smart Meters are to replace existing meters across Europe by 2022, with 80 per cent coverage being attained by 2020.

Great Britain has announced that it is backing the process all the way and aims to have every house in Britain equipped with a new Smart Meter within the next ten years. Here we take a look at what Smart Meters do, and why the world is so keen to make the switch.

1. Traditionally meters just give you the total amount of energy consumption for your household over a given period. The new meters will be far more detailed than this, giving up to the minute information on your consumption and the cost of this consumption.

2. The meters pass details of your power consumption back to your supplier so that they can monitor your power use. This means an end to estimated bills and the overcharging that can result with this method of meter reading.

3. Because information is sent directly to your supplier, energy suppliers will no longer need to pay to dispatch meter readers of their own, and hope to have less need for call centres set up to deal with customer queries about estimated bills. This all means savings for suppliers, and could lead to reduced energy rates for all of us.

4. The Smart Meter is a giant leap forward in meter reading technology, allowing users to see up-to-the-minute information on their energy consumption, and how much this is costing, on a display screen fitted within their homes. Here users can compare their usage by day, week or month to see where they are using most energy and where they can make improvements.

5. Smart Meter technology makes things a whole lot simpler for energy providers as the meters can be controlled remotely. This means that your provider can reset your tariff, reconnect or disconnect your supply, detect power shortages and poor quality power supplies as well as unauthorised use of power easily and remotely from their headquarters.

In order for us to make the switch to green energy, we will need a metering system in place that can deal with power supplies coming from a range of energy sources. Our standard metering system cannot handle this, and so Smart Metering is a prerequisite to our progress towards greener power.

About the Author:
British Gas can not only the leading gas suppliers, but can also provide you with a cheaper electricity supply too.