With electrical service provided by Fortis BC and AMR (automatic meter reading) meters, the City of Grand Forks is unlikely to switch to Smart meters any time soon.
Smart meters have become a topic of much discussion since BC Hydro revealed plans to install the new meters onto homes to replace the older dial meter.
Installed between 2004 and 2007, AMR meters can be mistaken as Smart meters due to their appearance.
“Somebody can be forgiven for taking a look and thinking it’s a Smart meter but it isn’t a Smart meter because it doesn’t have all the advanced features, like time-of-use, in-home displays and remote disconnects,” explained Alex Love, an electrical consultant from Nelson Hydro. “What we do have is radio reads, so the meter readers can pick up the readings very quickly instead of manually walking up to each house.”
The point of having an AMR meter or Smart meter, as opposed to the older dial-type meters, is to reduce and lower utility costs, Love noted.
“So if it lowers the cost of utility, then I’d say (Smart meters) are a good thing because it’s to the customers benefit,” he stated. “If it doesn’t, I’d say not really. The reason Grand Forks went to AMR meters was because there was a significant cost savings to be had and that helped keep the electrical rates down.”
Coun. Cher Wyers added, “Because we have our own electrical grid under FortisBC, (Smart meters) are not on our radar at the moment. It’s just too expensive.”
Mayor Brian Taylor felt that privacy concerns about Smart meters are noted but items like radiation are overblown.
“We do need to be concerned with privacy issues,” he said. “I’ve also read what BC Hydro is putting out and it appears they’ll be able to run a better operation with Smart meters.”
An AMR meter differs from Smart meters because while it does keep better track of power rates, they don’t have as many features as the Smart meters. In terms of privacy, Love pointed some of the information is off base about the Smart meters.
“A Smart meter that provides time-of-use billing information will tell the utility a lot more about when the customer is using power but it won’t tell them what appliances are being used, whether someone is using their computer or TV,” he stated. “It would just be too hard to figure that out.”
Though information can be determined on whether people have left for vacation or not, Love pointed out that is after the fact.
“You’d have to be able to deduce a trend to determine whether the people are home or not,” Love said. “In fact, that kind of information can probably be gleaned out of their energy consumption, if you look at their consumption of August. Utilities don’t bother doing that because they really don’t care whether people are home or not, but rather how much power is used.”
Information provided by the Smart meters is not public, nor should it be.
“It’s only held by electric utilities who have the same duty to keep that confidential as they do with the current metering,” Love added. “There isn’t a compelling reason for Grand Forks to switch to Smart meters now because the savings the Smart meter would provide is in reduced reading meter costs and we’ve already realized that with AMR meters. At this point, I can’t see any good reason.”
Regional District of Kootenay Boundary (RDKB) Area D Director Irene Perepolkin noted Area D, rural Grand Forks, is currently not looking into Smart meters or AMRs.
“We’re a smaller area so we’ll probably be one of the last to receive it,” she said. “There’s a lot of controversy over them, and I’m sure there’ll be quite a bit of opposition.”
RDKB Area C Director Grace McGregor concurred.
“The UBCM made a statement also, stating we need to be fully informed before anything like this takes place. I don’t believe communities have been involved or completely informed,” she stated.
“There’s people on both sides of the issue and I think we still need a lot of information.”
In Grand Forks, Love pointed out the AMR meters are working really well.
“They’ve been reliable, we’ve had no issues with meters failing and they have resulted in substantial time-saving for doing meter readings,” he said.
Though Love didn’t have any statistics on Grand Forks at hand, in Nelson, where they also use AMR meters, it takes 10 per cent of the time to read the meters than previously.
