Day/Night or Smart Meter?

I'm not going to hold my breath on better and more attractive rates on smart meters, the only direction I see coming is higher rates at peak periods, and our gombeen green minister is encouraging that nightmare scenario, in the misguided thought that the energy providers out of the goodness of their hearts will offer better rates to families that are under pressure.

I can see it now, more and more people unable to provide hot meals for their families at "peak periods" because the special rates are too high to be affordable, so meals will end up being moved to stupid times of the day or night in order to avoid the peaks. Who the hell does he think he's fooling?

In the same vein, I can see a situation where people who can actually help reduce generating demand by feeding solar power back into the grid will end up paying a higher standing charge to recompense those same suppliers for the loss of sales of their overpriced products, or there will be punitive standing charges if you don't take more than a certain number of high rate "day" units, for the same reasons, they have to justify their existence.

I won't be at all surprised to see a massive acceleration in the move away from gas, let alone oil, there's already been hints of a time when even a gas hob will not be allowed, so everything will be electric. There had better be some very robust plans in place to make very sure that they don't end up killing people as a result of no cooking, no heating, no hot water and no light, and no way to make a call to emergency services because the mobile networks and the land lines are all out of action because there's no power, the latest incarnation of land lines don't use copper, they use fibre, through the broadband router, which needs power in the house to transmit the signal. You may be very sure that our wonderful gombeens in power haven't even begun to look at the implications of an all electric future, let alone plan for how to make sure that life is safe in this brave new world that they're rushing us all headlong in to.

So am I, but it's not easy when you're on a fixed income. As for where all this is going, I'm not sure I want to think about it too much, it's depressing!

We're already on day/night, and have a relatively new "electronic" meter, the version before the smart meters, as the old dial 3 phase unit we had here went faulty a while back, so it had to be replaced. It's in the garage, so a pain to read, but as it's recent, and we're 3 phase, it will hopefully be a long way down the list, but that might become an issue if we want to get a feed in tariff activated for Solar. No easy way forward with this stuff. We've been day/night for years, and try to do the "heavy" loads for things like washing machines during the night period, though in recent years, the reduction in washing temperatures has made a signifciant difference to the power required. The heavier load during the winter is the drier, as that still uses significant power.

Take the point about the project to get the smart meters in, my concern will be the hit that poorest families will take as a result of using power to cook at peak times, with no alternatives to using electric, and I won't get started on what we're supposed to do in the event of wide area power cuts due to weather or the like, a house without solar including batteries is going to be a very unfriendly place in a few years time when oil and gas are no longer deemed "acceptable" usage, and there's no open fires any more. We had it 50 years ago in the UK when the miners and the Government crossed swords, and the power was off on a rolling basis for 16 hours a day for a number of weeks. It wasn't fun being all electric then, and it's still not fun now, and wil be even worse if we get things like electric vehicles that can't be charged, and IP phones that work on the broad band rather than copper cables, even things like a 999 call could be a problem if there's a wide area out of action, as the planning for those sorts of scenarios seems to be lacking, and there's no real awareness at political levels of the risks of such a scenario.

Well aware of the issues of no electricity, which is why I have no intention of parting with a standby generator that I used to have for a computer that was in a dedicated area of the garage. The generator is paid for now, and runs on green diesel or similar, so not a massive expense to keep, and it's the difference between having heat, light etc, or having very little. Whatever about a short duration power cut, we've seen some significant outages over the last few years, and I don't see it getting any better any time soon, unless the ESB find ways of weather proofing the distribution network.

I'm not against change, what I'm not happy about is the total absence of awareness from more than just the Green party of the real implications of some of the changes that they're not even thinking about, but are nodding through. I'm also considerably underwhelmed by the sorts of costs that are being revealed to make the change, and the SEAI schemes are not particularly user friendly. The one stop shops for the select few that can afford them will do very well, but the average home owner hasn't a hope of funding the sorts of costs that are being thrown around, and the implications for pensioners who had most or all of their hard earned reserves wiped out by the crash 10 years ago, that's another story altogether that I won't go into here. A pensioner on a fixed income doesn't have a hope in hell of paying 40 or 50 K to upgrade their home to keep their heating bills within a manageable (but still higher than they have been) level, and that's the sorts of figures that are being quoted for a house that's relatively young, and for many pensioners, downsizing is not an option because the smaller homes that they would be looking to move to are being snapped up by first time buyers with mortgages approved, and fetching astronomic prices because of the shortage of ANY new homes that are affordable, and depending on the age of those properties, they still may not be easily upgraded. In addition, if their own property has not been upgraded, the price they can get for it will be depressed because of the costs of the work to be done, and the time involved, which is deterring people from buying older properties as a result.

There are people who have been talking about change for a lot longer than 20 years, but there have also been a lot of vested interests that were equally determined that change wasn't going to happen and make their particular interest no longer viable, and those vested interests had the money to buy influence with politicians for a very long time, with the results that we've all seen.

The motor trade was a prime example, and bluntly, the construction industry hasn't exactly exerted itself in coming forward with energy saving ideas, the vast majority of change has been forced upon them rather than them proposing new ideas that would reduce the carbon footprint and ongoing living costs of new construction. I did things here when we moved in 32 years ago that are only now being grant aided to put them in, because they reduce energy usage, and there are still huge numbers of people who don't see the advantages of some of the changes I was aware of and implemented over a quarter of a century ago.

Make no mistake, some of the problems that are happening as a result of the recent world events are going to cause huge problems for many more people than are saying so at the moment, and unless there are significant changes to a whole range of things, the results are not going to be nice for the future.