I’m not sure how they can. The liability of turning off power without a large amount of advanced notification would be tremendous. Turning off the power to a customer’s house could mean turning off a home dialysis machine or ventilator for goodness sake.
There are battery backups for blackouts, but all it takes is one failing and all of a sudden the power company is liable for someone dying.
Most people who have itron meters don’t have actual smart meters, but AMR-enabled meters. These are basically “dumb” meters with an add-on transmitter that broadcasts the serial number and usage detail with about a 5 minute granularity, if somebody happens to be listening when the broadcast goes out.
The AMR meters transmit without encryption on public ISM frequencies, do not receive commands and can’t remotely turn off your electricity. These also do not in of themselves enable time-of-day or demand billing.
There is an open source project to decode AMR transmissions.. The most common models used in the USA look like this:
No, the power company didn’t make me buy my own electric meter. That would indeed be odd. Did you think I said it did? I said the opposite: “[The electric meter in my house is] the property, and the responsibility, of the utility.”
As a general legal principle the power company can turn the power off whenever they want. It depends on local law but by and large they aren’t liable for anything.
What you will sometimes see is a discounted supply which is a secondary supply to the premises. The secondary discounted supply is intermittent in some way. It goes on and off on a timer or is controlled by the power company, reflecting the wholesale price of electricity. This is intended to be suitable for large air con and heating loads.
What you connect to this needs to be certified by the electricity company however. They don’t want you to run your appliances off the cheap supply then switch them over to the full price supply when the cheap supply knocks off.
It is important to understand that the wholesale price of electricity at certain times of day is incredibly expensive, but at other times it is incredibly cheap. If 10 percent of the consumption could be shifted it would make a big difference to efficiency and infrastructural cost.
I had a helldesk job for the power company once. They did indeed, and with depressing regularity, turn off the power to people with o2 concentrators, dyalasys machines and the like, despite multiple warnings on those accounts not to. I once completely reset someone’s account and zeroed their debt on a manager-free night shift, just because they’d had so much shit. Never got caught for it either.
[quote=“bheerssen, post:9, topic:92020, full:true”]
Wouldn’t it be possible to install your own meter (smart or otherwise) between the circuit breaker and the power company’s meter? … It doesn’t even seem like it would cost all that much. [/quote]
If you just want to track your usage, you don’t actually need to install an entire power meter, you just need a clip on current transformer (CT) across each of the incoming lines where feed from the meter comes into your breaker panel, and then you need software to track the tiny current output by your CT.
Some only monitor the total usage, others can also read from individual branch circuits. You can use this setup to get your own near-real-time power usage data, and to compare your own data with your bill.
Ready-to-install solutions include TED 5000, Brultech GEM, efergy, etc.
I’m now wondering how long it will be before software is available which would allow homeowners to hack their own power meter. My guess is that these things would become secure fairly quickly once that happens.
Turned it off for not paying the bill? Or other reasons?
The bills for the medical devices were reimbursed (eventually) via the NHS, and were supposed to be discounted from the totals because of this. However, they never were. In the meantime, they’d chase the terminally ill customers for the money, up to, and including cutting them off.
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