Re: The paranoia!
"If it were just a question of making meter reading more efficient then installing smart meters that were interrogated every 3 months (or even every month at a pinch) would be all that was needed".
That is exactly what a couple of electricity retailers I worked with did; use smart meter HH data aggregated up to monthly consumption values, so billed on one 'virtual read'. Some minor issues with this (i.e. if there is a gap in the HH data, do you interpolate and/or estimate? or pull the data later and rebill?) but advantage is that it is just a cheaper way of reading meters, and the billing contract with the customer can remain unchanged. Contract law means that your retailer is limited in changing T&C's unilaterally.
"The fact that they want to monitor usage at levels down to every 30 minutes suggests there is more going on here".
Yes, they can measure consumption roughly in the period it occurs. That is it.
The retailer can then offer a better range of pricing, like cheaper power at night or middle of the day when they have power flooding the system they need to offload, and charge more when everybody is arriving home switching on ovens/heating and maxing out their local transformer. You have choices - you can stay on simple single rate plan or, if you are capable of setting a timer (some apparently can't) then take advantage and switch retailer and/or plans.
Network companies tend to use the information for planning consumption patterns so that they scale transformers or build out wiring if they can see things like a old office block being turned into apartments (they have information at a course level anyway, but can help planning)
If you think there is something more to it that, then tell me what it is?
I would think anybody working in the industry is as puzzled as I am at the odd beliefs that surround smartmeters. They can't watch you, won't give you cancer, and can't control your devices unless you choose to wire them in to some network controlled relay (and the network companies won't generally know anything about the devices attached). Even weirder is that the same people worried about smartmeters recording one variable (consumption in half-hour period) will also own phones. Telecom billing systems obviously collect much more personal information which _is_ used by governments and other agencies.
To put it another way, if you were selling KWH as your business, would you prefer to pay a person to wander slowly around the neighbourhood and read victorian era spinning dials, or get a read uploaded automatically on a daily basis?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
