Smart Meters for utilities such as electricity, water and gas have been slowly but surely rolling out across the globe. Smart meters are important because they allow for real time communication between an energy provider and the consumer. This allows for a more efficient and faster reacting energy grid, also known as the Smart Grid.
So what is a smart meter? It is an electronic energy meter (whether it be for water, gas, or electricity) that relays the energy usage back to the utility for monitoring and billing. What this means is that more and more households will have a device that can potentially tell them in real time what their energy usage is. Notice the use of ‘potentially’ in that last sentence.
Unfortunately some countries for whatever crazy reason insist on keeping this data between the meter and the utility provider. Ireland recently introduced mandatory water charges and installed just under a million smart water meters that communicate via RFID. Only the utility company has the ability to read the meters. The consumer has no access to the data whatsoever which in 2016 is a hugely backwards move.
Thankfully in France and many other countries, the story is different. The electricity meters in France come with a serial port that spits out energy usage once per second. The Micro Teleinfo V1.1 is a simple Serial-USB adapter that allows you to hook up the meter to a Raspberry Pi for example. From there you can log power usage to an SQL database, generate graphs, and only about a million other things. The great thing about these meters having a serial port is that you could read the data with a simple microcontroller and have a light in the house that changes colour from green to red depending on energy usage. This all fits in with the idea of smart homes we have been hearing about for the past decade. Utility companies making the data accessible is great electronic tinkering fodder, lets hope other countries copy the French!
