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Are prepaid meters the smartest meters in the industry right now?

I was recently delighted to find a brand new electronic meter on my house.  It was put there by one of the most progressive public power systems in the nation (i.e., Austin Energy).  Yet, I still get billed the very same way as if I still had that 100+ year old electromechanical meter technology mounted on the East wall of my home.  Some time after the utility reads the meter (now without having to send a live person into my neighborhood to do it), I get a bill in the mail or I can view it online.  It is a total dollar amount for my energy consumption for the past billing period, about a month.  There is no detail at all about by day of the month or by time of day.  There is no information at all about which of my appliances account for what portion of the total.  Even if some or all of this information were available, by the time that I get the bill, I have already made the decisions that caused my energy consumption and spending for that billing period.

I have called my utility (ad gone to their website) to ask, “How much have I spent on electricity so far this month?”  They cannot tell me.  “Wait for your bill,” they said.  Obviously, then, they could not tell me how much I spent yesterday or the same day a week ago or in the last hour, etc.  So, I asked them some questions about the last monthly bill that I got from them.  They could not tell me anything about which days, much less which hours of the day, cost me the most.  They could not tell me how much of my energy consumption or costs was caused by which appliances.  They offered to provide me with a lot of data to try to estimate this for myself.  I’ve been looking at it.  Have you ever tried to understand your electric bill?  Sheesh!  Customer charge, kilo-watt-hours, price per kilo-watt-hour, adjustment factors, etc.  What is a kilo-watt-hour, anyways.  Why are there so many more on the bill the past few months than there were earlier in the year?  How much of the bill was caused by my yard full of Halloween decorations?  (Oh, yeah, that will be on the bill that I get in December?)

Then I asked them if they could tell me how much of what I spent on the last bill was for coal power and how much was for wind energy.  And while the customer service representative remained polite, he was obviously ready to be done with my call after he had to tell me that he had no idea how big my carbon footprint was for the month in question.  I am assuming that I just lost the cell phone connection (and that he didn’t just hang up on me) when I asked when they would be able to tell me how much my carbon foot print is and how much of it is accounted for by the four big screen plasma TVs in my home.

I have a friend who has a prepay meter device.  It’s a kind of pay as you go arrangement where she goes online to add funds to her account when it gets low.  After learning more about how her arrangements works, I see that if I have a prepaid meter, I can know in almost real time what I have spent since the last time I made a payment.  With a little time and effort (monitoring and calculation), I can figure out what I am spending per hour.  With more time and effort (turning appliances off one at a time and repeating the hourly calculation) I can begin to understand which appliances are driving my energy consumption and costs.  With a even more monitoring and calculation, I can figure out how the utility’s price (actually, my cost per hour for a given menu of appliances running) is changing.  If I invest a lot more time and effort, I can start turning appliances off and on at the right times to save money (or reduce my carbon footprint, or help the utility not have so many outages).  It’s sure a pain going up in the attic to turn the hot water heaters on and off, though.  Especially when I’m not at home.  There’s got to be an easier way to do this?

Why won’t the smart meter that recently appeared on the side of my house do the same thing?  Why can’t I choose to see this information in real time in an iPhone app?  After all, I’m not at home a lot of the time.  Why doesn’t my utility offer an iPhone app that will let me turn some appliances off when the utility is charging me the most?  What if I want to turn some appliances on only during the times when I am sure that the additional power that Austin Energy gets for me is from wind or solar or natural gas and not from coal or nuclear?

Again, as I asserted in my post earlier this week, a smart meter needs to be (and existing technology options make it possible to be) much more than a real time price signal.  It needs to be an “easy button.”