by Todd Woody
Flickr via Pink Sherbet PhotographyThe other day I came home to find a colorful flyer on my
front door proclaiming, “Your meter just got smarter.”
While I was out and about in Berkeley, a worker from my
utility, PG&E, slipped in the side gate and gave my old gas and electric
meter a digital upgrade. So-called smart meters allow the two-way transmission
of electricity data and will eventually let me monitor and alter my energy
consumption in near real-time. I’ll be able to fire up an app on my iPhone and
see, for instance, a spike in watts because my son has left the lights on in
his room and a laptop plugged in.
Now I only learn of my electricity use when I get my monthly
utility bill, long after all that carbon has escaped into the atmosphere. The
situation is even worse when it comes to water consumption; my bill and details
of my water use arrive every other month.
“When you tell people what total bucket of water they used
in the past 60 days, the barn door is open and the animals are long gone,” says
Richard Harris, water conservation manager for the East Bay Municipal Utility
District, my local water agency.
EBMUD is currently testing smart water meters in 30
households and plans to expand the pilot program to 4,000 homes and businesses later
this year.
“It’ll give us better knowledge of where our water is
going,” says Harris. “We also thought if we’re going to ask people to use water
more efficiently, especially when we’re coming out of a drought and have
imposed water restrictions, customers need to have an idea of what their
current use is.”
EBMUD’s smart meters take readings every hour and
participants in the pilot program will be able to go online to check their
consumption and set up an email alert if their water use rises above a certain
level. The agency also plans to offer a social networking feature to allow
people to compare their water consumption with other households in the area.
Nothing like a little peer pressure to get you to turn off the tap.
Given that many states expect to face water shortages in the
coming years, one would think we’d be seeing a roll out of smart
water meters akin to the national effort being made to smarten up the power
grid.
The payoff could be enormous. Water agencies and consumers
would be able to detect leaking pipes and toilets in real-time and fix the
problem before the water literally goes down the drain.
Imagine a video screen in your shower that displays how many
gallons that long hot shower is consuming. Smart water meters would also open
the door to financial incentives to get people to use less water and penalize
water hogs. (That said, politically
powerful agribusiness remains by far the biggest water user.)
“You don’t need to send someone out to read the meter or
roll a truck to connect or disconnect a meter,” says Guerry Waters, vice
president for industry strategy at Oracle Utilities, a division of the Silicon
Valley software giant. “Smart water meters can help you manage assets and detect
leaks. There’s a staggering amount of water lost to leaks.”
Yet, according to a
recent report by Oracle, while 68 percent of 300 American and Canadian water managers
surveyed said they believe that smart water meters are crucial, 64 percent of
them have no plans to install them.
Why? Money.
Nearly all water providers are public agencies, which means
they’re strapped for cash and already facing a long list of capital improvement
projects. The electric utility industry, on the other hand, is largely private
and can either make the capital investments necessary for, say, a smart meter
roll out, or can obtain regulators’ approval to raise rates to cover the costs.
In fact, 75 percent of the water managers surveyed said the
capital costs of smart water meters was their main roadblock to rolling out
such a program.
That presents a conundrum to companies like Oracle, which
already sells software and services to water districts, hoping to tap a
potentially vast smart water meter market.
IBM, meanwhile, has developed sensor
networks and software it hopes to market to water districts to give them
real-time data on water quality and to help manage their pipelines and
infrastructure.
“Water districts don’t have the funding and have to find a
way to pay for these systems,” Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM’s
Venture Capital Group, told me last year. “There’s this whole issue of how do
we put this intelligence in water systems in a way that’s affordable for the
ratepayers.”
One solution would be to devote some stimulus money or other
federal largesse to underwrite a rollout of smart meters.
But Tom Blaisdel, a venture
capitalist with DCM in Silicon Valley, thinks markets are the answer. “The
problem in water is usually not a lack of technology but a lack of economic
drivers to get people to adopt the technology,” he says. “Until you have market
pricing you won’t have innovation and investment.”
Putting aside agricultural use—which in California is a
political minefield—residential water pricing tends to be driven by drought
and conservation mandates. As California’s drought dragged on, EBMUD and other water
agencies imposed a tiered pricing structure that bumped up rates for water
hogs.
For Harris, the future of water conservation lies more in
providing data to customers rather than such things as rebates for
water-efficient toilets.
“It’s all about giving customers a smart water toolbox,” he says.
Related Links:
State of the Union: Inefficient
How innovative financing is changing energy in America
Supreme Court ruling increases importance of local energy
