Many utilities will soon be installing smart meters on people’s homes. The vision is that someday in the future most residential homes will be equipped with a smart meter. This is part of the smart grid initiative.

Once these meters are in place a rate program will most likely come along. These rate programs are designed to help cut back on peak demands during the most heavy electrical use days of the year. Most of these heavy use days come in the summer due to air conditioning units, large residential and commercial appliances, pool pumps, etc…

In order to cut back residential use a rate hike in electrical prices will occur during peak use hours. Visit the smart grid glossary for an example of the electrical demand curve during a summer day.

The utility PG&E has launched a “SmartRate” program to allow people to receive a discount on their normal electrical rate and in return these customers participate in up to 15 “SmartDays” a year where the electrical rate becomes more expensive during peak times. People who actively cut back their electrical use during these “SmartDays” can save throughout the year.

What is the Summer Pricing Plan?
The SmartRate™ Summer Pricing Plan offers you a new way to save money on your summer electric bills while also benefiting the environment. For no more than 15 days—what we call SmartDays™, we’ll notify you to manage your energy use between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. By controlling your energy usage during high-demand periods on SmartDays, you’ll help prevent the need to purchase “dirty” power from inefficient power plants that can be damaging to the environment.
From: PG&E Smart Rate

Check out the PG&E website for more details, plan eligibility, rates, and more.

Probably the most recognized part of the smart grid is the meter. The smart grid is much more than just smart meters, but for now lets look at what these meters will be designed to do.

The smart meter is a meter that can communicate from the utility to the consumer and also from the consumer to the utility. The smart meter can recieve pricing data real time and will be able to relay it to household appliances. It can recieve demand response signals to help reduce the load on the electrical system in an emergency and help prevent the need for load shedding or rolling blackouts.

One more very important function of the smart meter is that it will report when your power is out. Believe it or not, for many utilities around the country in some areas the first notification they get that the power is out is phone calls from people! With smart meters the notification to the utility operators that there is an outage will be instant. The information from the meters will help the utility diagnose how large the outage is and also where the problem is that caused the outage.

In summary the smart meter will help utilities increase reliability and outage response.