Categories

Archives
« US Smart Grid Work to Cost $60 Billion  
  Solar Power Prices kWh Headed Lower? »

Study: Smart Meters Benefit Consumers

The Brattle Group’s recent study suggests that Smart Meters will provide net benefits from $96 to $287 million over a 20-year time period for a U.S. utility with one million residential customers.

That does NOT seem like a ton of benefit… at the high end, $287 per residential customer over 20 years is less than $30 per person on a non-discounted basis. Pretty small benefits!

Let’s hope there are more benefits that will accrue if the residents take advantage of other cost benefits of a smarter grid.

More on the study, from Smartgridobserver:

The study estimates the operational benefits that each utility would accrue as it replaces its existing metering infrastructure with smart meters, which allow for two-way communication between the consumer and the utility. In one case, the operational benefits virtually covered the installation investment. However, in all cases, additional benefits would accrue as customers participate in specific smart meter-enabled program offerings, including household energy use information delivered to customers in real time via in-home devices and web portals; dynamic pricing with and without technology options such as programmable thermostats with display information; direct load control with measurement and verification; and electric vehicles with a time-varying rate.

April 1st, 2011 | Tags: , | Category: advanced metering

136 comments to Study: Smart Meters Benefit Consumers

1 2 3
1 2 3

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>