Do you remember that television remote control that always appeared to be smarter than you? Well, you are about to get an electric meter and a gas meter that might appear smarter, too.
San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) is rolling out 1.4 million “smart” electric meters and 900,000 “smart” gas meters to all homes and businesses throughout its service area in San Diego County and parts of Orange County. The meters will enable customers to go online and see how much electric power and gas they used throughout the preceding day on an hour-by-hour basis. For businesses, usage will be broken into 15-minute intervals.
Power company officials believe that with this kind of timely feedback, “customers will be better able to understand their consumption patterns and make adjustments that could reduce consumption, cut their power bills and help the environment,” said spokesperson April Bolduc.
Installation is scheduled to be completed throughout North San Diego County, including Ramona, by March 2010, and the entire service area will be covered by December 2011.
The average homeowner’s bill will see an increase of $2.50 each month to recoup the cost of the new meters, but this will be for a limited time, which is expected to be “fairly short,” said Bolduc.
Once the meter is installed at a home, SDG&E will check it for three months to ensure that the information it generates about that home is in sync with the information generated on the company’s internal records.
The homeowner will then be able to go online and start making comparisons. For example, Bolduc said, during peak periods in summer, a homeowner might like to set the air conditioning thermostat at varying levels each day during a hot spell and then compare the daily, even hourly, use of electricity.
“They might find that two or three degrees warmer is more than offset by the energy saving,” she said. “More insulation in the home, or a more energy-efficient refrigerator might cut energy usage. It’s much easier to make decisions like this with an hourly breakdown of power usage instead of trying to figure it all out from a single bill at the end of the month.”  
Eventually, each person will be able to get the use in terms of dollars instead of kilowatt/hours, etc., but that is “down the road a little,” Buldoc said.  
The new system will also eliminate a frustrating problem that Ramona resident Woody Kirkman said cost him unnecessary power expense.
Kirkman, who works from his home and is deeply involved in solar energy, said he is not alone in experiencing times when the meter was under-read one month and then over-read the next month. The total amount of power used in the two months is the same, but the second month of over-reading has thrown him into more expensive per kilowatt/hour charges, which have cost him money.
“I went to the SDG&E and to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) but got nowhere. They told me that I had used the power and had to pay for it without any consideration for the extra I paid because of the misreading,” said Kirkman.
Without addressing Kirkman’s particular issue, Bolduc said that any such possible errors will be eliminated under the new system because there will no longer be meter readers — everything will be done by computers with internal backups for whatever the home meter says.
Another public benefit, according to Bolduc, is “We will know immediately when there is a power outage anywhere in our area.  Right now, we don’t know about an outage until someone out there calls in to tell us. With this system we will know immediately and be able to launch repair crews much faster.”
Refinements are expected as the new system rolls out. A test run was done in Tierrasanta, and 7,200 large businesses in the service area are already on smart meters.
Initially, the idea was that people would go to the SDG&E site for their information.
“But we did a survey and found of the 80 percent who said they would like to have the information online, most would prefer to get it from a site they use for other information, such as the weather, traffic, films or other stuff they check every day.”
So last week, SDG&E signed an agreement with Google so that, when the system is fully operational, people can go to Google for their information. There will be agreements with other servers in the future.
Boldec stressed two things. First, only data will be sent to Google. There will be no personal information transmitted, and second — “No there will not be an increase in rates as a result of all this,” said Boldec. “It was all approved by the PUC two years ago and any future rate increases must go back before the PUC.”