Re: The real reason for smart meters
@ c1ue: You're on the right lines, but only lukewarm so far...
1(a) When Nudge comes to Shove (instantaneous demand about to exceed available supply), expensive tariffs won't be enough. Time of Day (see below) will become Time of Darkness - it'll be the Kill Switch unless you've paid a whopping premium for an Uninterruptible Tariff*.
2(a) The "ever more blatant messaging from said utility companies to consumers to reduce consumption" won't be messaging, it'll be Time of Day tariffs. At times when you want to use electricity, it will be prohibitively expensive: the weekly wash, Sunday lunch, evening meals, breakfast time - GOTCHA !
2(b) Time of Day tariffs will work wonders for Confusion Marketing. You'll never be able to compare tariffs in a meaningful way because Big Energy 1 will take great care to make sure that their ToD parameters are very different to Big Energy 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. Think RyanAir on steroids....
2(c) As 2(b), except that there will lots more lovely confusion when using more than, say 3kW, attracts a hefty surcharge. Only when almost everyone has been conned into having a Smart Meter will Big Energy activate all the tricks that can be used.
Smart People have Dumb Meters. Dumb People have Smart Meters.
*Excludes area power outages