Has our technology outstripped our ambition?
Why are we still trying to solve the same problems we were tackling 30 years ago? It’s a question pondered by Utilita chair Derek Lickorish as he looks back on his time developing the original smart meter back in the 1980s.
Sometimes looking backwards can help us see the future rather more clearly.
More than 40 years ago, at the South Eastern Electricity Board (Seeboard) I was fortunate to be involved with a small team working on the Credit and Load Management Unit (CALMU).
Today we would call it a smart meter. But that description rather understates what we were trying to achieve. CALMU grew from work led by Seeboard chairman Robert Peddie and engineer John Fielden. Their patent application dated from 1979 and described electronic measurement, monetary displays, communications between the customer and electricity supplier and even facilities for electronic credit transfer. By December 1983, CALMU was being trialled in around 300 homes. Contemporary Parliamentary evidence subsequently described it as the world's first smart meter.
I recently had our April 1984 field-trial interim-report digitised. Reading it again after four decades was a slightly surreal experience. The technology is, of course, primitive by today's standards. The ideas are anything but.
We were actively using, and exploring, two-way communications, remote meter reading, multiple tariffs, time-of-use pricing, credit management, customer displays and load management. But there was a more important idea behind all of this.
Derek Lickorish MBE is chair of Utilita Energy. He also chairs National Energy Action and previously held the same role on the government’s Fuel Poverty Advisory Group.
Derek Lickorish MBE is chair of Utilita Energy. He also chairs National Energy Action and previously held the same role on the government’s Fuel Poverty Advisory Group.
Sometimes looking backwards can help us see the future rather more clearly.
More than 40 years ago, at the South Eastern Electricity Board (Seeboard) I was fortunate to be involved with a small team working on the Credit and Load Management Unit (CALMU).
Today we would call it a smart meter. But that description rather understates what we were trying to achieve. CALMU grew from work led by Seeboard chairman Robert Peddie and engineer John Fielden. Their patent application dated from 1979 and described electronic measurement, monetary displays, communications between the customer and electricity supplier and even facilities for electronic credit transfer. By December 1983, CALMU was being trialled in around 300 homes. Contemporary Parliamentary evidence subsequently described it as the world's first smart meter.
I recently had our April 1984 field-trial interim-report digitised. Reading it again after four decades was a slightly surreal experience. The technology is, of course, primitive by today's standards. The ideas are anything but.
We were actively using, and exploring, two-way communications, remote meter reading, multiple tariffs, time-of-use pricing, credit management, customer displays and load management. But there was a more important idea behind all of this.
Could electricity demand itself become an active part of managing the power system?
That question feels remarkably contemporary. Britain is transforming an electricity system built around relatively predictable large power stations into one containing enormous quantities of intermittent renewable generation, distributed generation, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and increasingly active consumers.
We consequently talk constantly about flexibility, demand-side response, dynamic tariffs, digitalisation and system visibility. Yet many of those principles were being explored at Seeboard before the first Apple Macintosh had gone on sale.
CALMU could communicate in both directions. It could record consumption against different tariffs and enable load to respond to changing system conditions. Work at the time even considered broadcasting electricity price signals on Ceefax to which appliances could respond according to parameters selected by the householder. Contemporary academic literature described precisely this capability.
The thinking went further still. In 1987, work associated with CALMU examined “load management for power-system emergencies”; effectively asking whether demand could help protect the electricity system during serious disturbances.
That represented an important change in philosophy. The traditional electricity system largely followed demand: consumers used electricity when they wished and generators were dispatched to meet it.
Digital measurement and communications offered another possibility: under appropriate circumstances, demand could also respond to the needs of the system. Forty years later, we have vastly more computing power, near-ubiquitous communications, sophisticated forecasting, artificial intelligence, millions of smart meters and growing quantities of controllable electrical equipment.
Yet I sometimes wonder whether our ambition has kept pace with our technology. Britain's smart-meter programme has achieved a great deal, but public discussion has understandably tended to focus on meter installation, billing accuracy and in-home displays. Those things matter. But a smart meter should ultimately be considered part of something much larger: the sensory and communications infrastructure of an increasingly complex electricity system.
Technology as an enabler
The electricity system of the future needs to be observable. System operators need to understand, increasingly close to real time, not simply how much electricity is being generated and consumed nationally, but what is happening throughout an increasingly decentralised network.
When renewable generation is plentiful, demand should, where practical, be encouraged to move towards it, with automation enabling this to happen seamlessly, within parameters set by the consumer, rather than relying on constant human intervention. Conversely, when networks are constrained or generation scarce, flexible demand, storage and other distributed resources should be capable of responding automatically to the needs of the system. That is where digitalisation can turn millions of individual devices from passive loads into active participants in balancing the electricity system.
That does not mean surrendering consumer choice to a central computer. Quite the reverse. Technology should allow consumers to decide the degree to which they wish to participate and to receive a fair share of the value their flexibility creates. This is where I think the CALMU story becomes relevant rather than merely historical. We should stop asking only: “What should the next smart meter do?” The bigger question is: “What information and control architecture does the future electricity system require?”
Once framed that way, the meter becomes one component within a much broader digital ecosystem involving generation, networks, storage, EVs, heat pumps, home-energy systems, suppliers, aggregators and the system operator.
That architecture also needs interoperability. One lesson from more than five decades in this industry is that technology changes much faster than infrastructure. We should therefore be cautious about designing the future around individual devices, communications technologies or proprietary solutions. Wherever possible, we should define the information the system needs, common standards by which it is exchanged, who may access it, and the governance and cyber-security arrangements surrounding it, while allowing the underlying technologies to evolve.
In other words, concentrate on data interoperability rather than simply device interoperability.
There is another lesson from CALMU. Innovation does not necessarily fail because the engineering is wrong. CALMU worked. Trials were successful. Yet the electricity industry was moving towards privatisation and restructuring, and the environment in which the technology had been conceived changed dramatically. Parliamentary evidence later observed that commercialisation stalled as attention shifted towards privatisation.
But the technology did not disappear. The intellectual property subsequently passed to India, where the foresight and resources existed to take the concept forward. CALMU technology was identified by what became Secure Meters, which entered into technical collaboration with Polymeters in 1987 and continued to develop and commercialise it.
There is perhaps an irony here: an idea born in the British electricity industry, but overtaken by structural change at home, found the environment in India in which it could continue to evolve, and ultimately became the foundation for a very successful international metering business.
Institutional architecture can therefore matter every bit as much as technical architecture. That should give us pause today.
The UK has extraordinary engineering capability and an enormous programme of investment ahead of it. But responsibilities for data, metering, networks, markets, system operation, communications and consumer protection are spread across numerous organisations and governance arrangements.
If the interfaces between them are poorly designed, no amount of clever technology will create a genuinely low latency smart electricity system. I am certainly not suggesting that we should recreate CALMU. The world has moved on beyond recognition. But perhaps we should recover some of the ambition behind it.
Forty years ago, with extraordinarily limited computing and communications technology, we were already asking whether millions of individual electricity consumers could become visible, responsive participants in operating the power system.
Today we finally possess the technology to make that possible at enormous scale. For example, Project Gigabit is the government’s programme to enable hard-to-reach communities to access lightning-fast gigabit-capable broadband. It targets homes and businesses that are not included in broadband suppliers’ plans, reaching parts of the UK that might otherwise miss out on getting the super fast digital connectivity they need. The government is committed to achieving nationwide gigabit coverage and expects 99% of premises to have access to a gigabit-capable connection by 2032.
The challenge for the next generation of smart energy may therefore be rather different from the one we have spent the past decade addressing.
It is no longer simply about making the meter smarter.
It is about making the electricity system smarter.
This article first appeared in Utility Week's sister website, GridEx Global gridexglobal.com
