Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/23/smart_meters_are_dog_toffee_says_nao/ National Audit Office now says estimated saving for you and I is, er, just £18 a year Parliamentarians are set to haul civil servants in for a grilling after the National Audit Office (NAO) confirmed the UK will miss its 2020 smart meter rollout target, piling an extra £500m onto the cost of the £11bn project. I mean, I still think this is useful for combating Climate Change and the like, but £11.5bn for this is extreme. Our government is TERRIBLE with cost overruns.

All governments are terrible with cost overruns. Every time a contractor sees a government contract their eyes light up thinking about how much they can swindle out of the taxpayer, knowing full well the bureaucrats have no idea how to financially manage something. 11.5bn could have bought several nuclear power plants.

Wouldn't that just have just ended up with cost overruns as well?

Probably. The issue is the government doesn't enforce contract enough and/or doesn't include harsh enough penalties for overruns. They also don't have the financial acumen to realise when a company is ridiculously lowballing a cost to get the contract, knowing full well the agreed cost isn't realistic.

Last year a new cinema was built near me, at the same time the local government were adding a 40m turning lane on the road alongside the cinema. The entire cinema was finished being built before the 40m stretch of road. Only a small percentage of the contracted workers would even be working, half the time they'd just be standing around 1 or 2 people working.

how is adding millions of extra devices to people's homes combating anything?

Lol, they were probably paid by the hour.

You see, it's all very reasonable and understandable, these people have very important jobs that someone from outside the industry wouldn't understand: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/143062/92e24df3-2b23-431f-b05e-ccdaa7b8c14c/image.png

It doesn't, it just more accurately measures the end users useage and thereby more accurate billing. Less over/undercharging a customer for electricity they didn't or did use. I work for a water metering company and we do the same thing with our meters (without being over budget lol) so that end users can see their water consumption more readily. It doesn't inherently save anyone water/electricity, but it does gain insight for the end user to potentially change their consumption behavior.

Okay, I've been fitting these things for a Big Six energy company with a former cornered market I.E. a company that was formed from the bones of the old electricity board, and thus had a huge customer base available in my region. I've been working like fuck all week and times are hard so I didn't want to type too much now but whoops, I have. The crux of the smart meter problem has been yet another case of Tories and what remains of the Civil Service taking something with huge potential to be a positive change and doing the bare minimum, making their policy failures someone else's problem, and driving the whole thing into the ground. The rollout began several years too soon - in my opinion it should have commenced this year when SMETSv2 was released - with the early in home monitors being fairly crap, meters unreliable and each supplier being required to pay for and produce their backend system. Ours was written by a very poor government contractor with a reputation within the industry for doing, surprise, the bare minimum and trying to squeeze as much money from the client as possible. The entire cost of the smart rollout was imposed upon the suppliers, resulting in soaring energy costs. Add to this the cost of a massive (mandated by Government) uptake of engineers off the street, including myself, tooling up and training those engineers, and the day to day running costs like contact centres and the many, many missed appointments for which we give a sizeable compo payment. Currently our cost for each dual fuel smart meter installation exceeds £220. Run the numbers of how many customers we have and you've got very large numbers. So large that some suppliers are breaking off their household utility businesses as the other arms of their company (transmission, generation, contracting) are being dragged down from a place of relative prosperity in share price and suffering from increased volatility. The full-spec, future proofed meters are currently in rollout. The idea is to be able to change suppliers and that the meters can handle nearly anything we ask of them, crucially able to handle ALCS which are network-controlled switches that could, with better management in the future, be used to aid in the rollout of demand side response and peak-off peak tariffs to homes. Unfortunately the rollout has been incredibly bumpy and is driving my company into panic with massive compensation payments, increased rates of aborted jobs (often homes that will not be able to recieve the new smart meters, ever, without huge expensive electrical work being carried out at the customer's expense) and extended time on each job. All of this is happening because of the way the project was designed: A near-immediate start date without the plan or technology being even nearly ready; costs borne by the energy companies who have shareholders to please; a code of practice that gave the homeowner the right to refuse a meter exchange (a historic first as we previously had wide ranging rights of access to metering equipment); and threat of monumental fines for underachievement or non-compliance with the code of conduct based on a percentage of yearly revenue, fines which are large enough to put firms into administration. Since I joined my company, a culture of fear has developed and a feeling that the management is permanently on a war footing with the regulator, always preparing to fight off more summary judgment against us for failing un-achievable targets. I cannot understate the damage that all the above has done to the future of our energy industry, and crucially our energy security.