bill payne says

They pollute.

Google 'scripting languages pollute' for details.

We are investigating if large-scale solar generation of electricity is a fraud.

But want to get paid to do this.

http://www.prosefights.org/scriptpollute/pnmproposal/pnmproposal.htm#collawn

Darby Hanson says

Ideally, a company (utility or other entity) could install solar panels over large parking lots, especially at the malls and large employer parking lots. Each support post could have several plugs activated by a credit or other similar card reader. Excess energy would go the the utility or to the property owner - whoever owns the system.

For either case, the customer (vehicle owner) gets the bill via their credit or debit card regardless of the serving utility. At a residence, I would just give my guest a few hours of juice - it wouldn't cost much. I would consider it to be quite rude to charge a freind for a few kWhs, but my rates are fairly low.

Len Gould says

And that proper piece of billing software will also need to be able to distinguish automatically that charging the new car which just plugged in at my friend's house should be billed to me, not to him. A proper metering system should do that automatically.

Utilities need to stop dreaming up reasons for resistance and c'mon into the new century. Really, if the new "advanced" metering systems you just made up pay for can't at least be simply upgraded for these capabilities, then it's you who've been wasting my money. Catch up.

Bob Amorosi says

Len, you are absolutely correct but the trouble is nobody's smart metering system is equipped or programmed to do this. It's kind of like the chicken and egg problem because smart meter systems have been developed in isolation from the automotive industry who is only recently developing and introducing plug-in vehicles to consumers.

Worse, the smart meters deployed in the field today by the millions would have to all be replaced at huge cost to implement these extra capabilities to handle proper billing of electric vehicle owners. And the problem I have be screaming about on this website for ages now is utility companies don't have (and in many cases don't want to spend) the money for it,

Jerry Watson says

Bob Amorosi says

I agree with your comments. There needs to be individual vehicle metering that will communicate (somehow) with the location they are charging at, anywhere, anytime. This could potentially be communicating with the customer’s smart meter at the charging location, or some other billing device at the charging location if the metering is built into the vehicle. But wait, this is not so simple…..

This will be a massive infrastructure project because some new electric vehicles are purposely going to have the capability to "plug-in" to ANY standard AC wall outlet. There are literally hundreds of millions of standard wall outlets in North America alone, most within residential homes. If I want to plug into my grandma’s house, is she going to want to use a billing device that talks to my car? I doubt it. The metering of the vehicle’s recharge will almost certainly have to be handled by the home’s smart meter, or alternatively handled by metering electronics within the vehicle that communicates with the home’s smart meter because the location’s smart meter is the only way the local utility company can identify the location of the charging.

Yes indeed a lot has to happen yet in vehicle electronics and in smart metering electronics before electric vehicles can be widely adopted by millions of drivers. In the meantime look for much more controlled recharging of electric vehicles where only special public charging stations or battery swap-out stations can handle this problem. We’ll just have to watch out for our neighbors or fly-by-night strangers parking near our house stringing an extension cord across our lawns at night to steal a free charge from our houses in the meantime.

Len Gould says

Mark Gabriel says

Bob Amorosi says

The subject of your nice article here has been one of the messages I have been preaching on this website for some time now - who is going to pay for all the innovation being touted in the utility industry.

Utilities avoiding replacing their existing billing systems or reprogramming them for a subset of customers to handle EVs is an example of how innovative change in the utility industry is continually stifled by their existing regulatory environment. Without changes to their regulation that would allow utilities to raise extra money somehow for innovation, they will continue to want to treat all customers the same way. And any changes that do come tend to get implemented to all customers or none, and only at a snail's pace as compared with other industries. If changes must always apply to all customers (by regualtion), then any changes that do come along are naturally going to be expensive.

Len Gould says

I suspect that your complaint is regarding the complexity of your commercial and industrial billing, not residential. Split em up, and make the complex system pay for itself.

Bob Amorosi says

I agree the prospect of using the residential customer's smart meter to give credits to customers who charge other people's EVs is in principle not that technically complicated. To the utility company it would simply mean shuffling portions of one bill to another, and technically this wouldn't be difficult from a software prospective assuming the hardware to communicate with the meters is in the vehicles and the meters. However utilities will probably strongly resist this approach for big reasons as follows.

Current smart meter technology is still modeled after the old conventional electromechanical service meters where each has a electronic display on its face that shows cumulative energy consumption at that customer's site. To credit the customer for a portion of the displayed total each time another customer's vehicle is charged would mean the meter must also adjust downwards its display to reflect only the energy billed to the property owner. Similarly the meter at the vehicle owner's site would be appropriately adjusted upwards to reflect his billing. If these meter displays are not adjusted, it opens the door to widespread billing disputes between customers and the utility, which is a nightmare the utilities will fiercely avoid at any cost.

Moreover, here in Canada we have the Measurement Canada agency of our federal government that tests and approves all utility meter designs before authorizing them for commercial use on homes by utilities. One of their criteria for certification of smart meters is they will only permit meters that are tamper proof, where customers AND the utilities are both prevented from altering a meter's internal programming for any reason, especially anything that would change the total energy consumption displayed. As such a utility cannot even upgrade a meter's software for any reason without replacing the meter, even when the meters are designed to be field upgradeable using simple software reprogramming.

So even though Len raises a correct technical argument that might even be simple to implement, there are huge political barriers (including regulation) that prevent utilities from even wanting to do it.

Len Gould says

Len Gould says

Bob Amorosi says

Your suggestion to leave the meter displays as is would work fine provided the utility made it clear to the customer that his billing is based on a software calculation and not the meter display. Indeed this might be a viable solution by default because all of our bills under Time-Of-Use billing will be based on a software calculation at the utility office anyways. For example two customers could have the same total kwhr energy usage displayed on their meters but different energy bills owing because their TOU behaviors differed.

Putting the communication hardware and software into vehicles and all the meters of course is the only real problem i.e. who pays for this.

Len Gould says

How much could it cost if it were standard on every vehicle? $20, tops?

Len Gould says

Bob Amorosi says

It may be in fact less than $20 in large volumes. The big issue is the millions of meters already deployed in the field that would need to be upgraded i.e. replaced, to add a simple power-line carrier transceiver and the additional software to handle vehicles. Now, if those meters belonged to the customer instead of the utility, I’m sure most consumers would gladly do it, but expecting the utility companies to do it is another story.

Malcolm Rawlingson says

Malcolm

Jim Beyer says

When central air became popular, the grid managed to deal with that. I'd think the impact on a neighborhood feeders was just as severe in that case, if not more so.

Jeff Presley says

The other part of this article I agree with is the impact on billing systems of distributed generation, which is often blithely ignored by newcomers. I worked for some time at a little outfit called Itron, that at the time had something like 80% utility market share. I saw all kinds of cobbled-together utility billing systems that were about as easy to replace as the Golden Gate Bridge. Not something you're going to do in 3 months Len, godlike programming abilities notwithstanding. In fact some of these systems cost dozens of millions of dollars just to deal with the Y2K bug. You think those mainframes are going to suddenly accept c# code? Even if you could buy a compiler, you think it will be bug free? You believe the entrenched IT departments are going to allow you free access into their baby?

Nope, the metaphor here is a superhighway carrying millions of cars daily, and you're going to try and update it without affecting the traffic in any way. Good luck with that.

john Marsh says

Len Gould says

Jeff: Mainframes make good web and database servers, and that's where they need to be relegated asap. No company which is still running their primary interface software on a mainframe is going to survive the next 10 or 20 years anyway, so I wouldn't worry.