According to various news outlets today, Lord Truscott, one of the “Peers for Laws” had boasted that he had initiated amendments to legislation forcing the installation of smart meters. This may be a good thing I hear you say. But basically it is a wheeze to allow the electricity companies to sack their meter readers and force us to pay for the expensive meters so they don’t have to read them.
This has stymied a much cheaper and quicker to implement plan to put cheap-and-cheerful real time clip on monitors which can be simply connected by current clips installed by the householder and which give as good an indication to the user of what he is using when as a smart meter. The reason the utilities favour this approach is because they have sacked so many meter readers and people who understand billing, and who know where all the meters are, that they cannot read the meters or actually calculate correct bills.
For more incompetence this time from WPD, once part of SWEB see Gossage.
Wessex Water (and all the other water companies) were plagued by the inability of the utilities – to actually read electricity meters on time – or even at all – which you would think would be a fundamental part of their business plan.
You would also think they would actually be able to work out how much to bill. Wessex Water’s annual bill was around 18 million Pounds, yet the Wessex Energy Team regularly made 1 million Pounds / year saving by detecting billing errors due to meter mis reads or simply mis calculations. During the entire time that SWEB / LE / EDF had the half hour supply contract, they were quite unable to send Wessex a correct bill.
On two occasions Wessex people were sent down to SWEB’s offices in Exeter for 3 days to physically input the data into their billing computer since Wessex found SWEB simply couldn’t follow instructions as to how to bill Wessex correctly. As a result Wessex knew that SWEB must be overcharging many of its other HH customers, because Wessex discovered systematic errors which they must have been applying to other customers who were unaware of them (probably still are) – mainly to do with pass through charges and line loss factors. Wessex even had to develop their own software Chellow to automate the bill checking process along with the excellent Stark software.
The actual personnel at SWEB and WPD were excellent, but let down by lack of staff and a hopeless management system who refused to acknowledge the lack of staff or the hopeless software system.