Sigh. There are (imho) so many holes in this story I don’t know where to start

[news.bbc] UK energy smart meter roll-out is outlined

“the £8bn scheme”

That’s about £340 per household on average.

Except CurrentCost Energy meters are available on ebay for about £40. No wiring required. If you can open a cardboard box and put a plug into a wall socket (ie, if you can work a kettle), you can setup one of these yourself.

We’ve had one for a couple of years, and they are indeed ace.

So where’s that extra £300 going? Of course, the story doesn’t say, but I’m going to guess.

This isn’t about reducing energy usage. This is about fitting a new national network of meters that can be read remotely, and thus save the energy companies from having to send people around door to door to “read the meter”.

Sure, it’s a win. But we’ll save more carbon footprints from not sending the meter readers around every house once a quarter than we will by reducing peoples energy usage.

“47 million meters in 26 million properties”

million, billion, trillion, lots and lots, so it must be a big deal!

Lets be generous and assume a “property” is a building, so could contain multiple residences. Minus marks for unclear language tho.

“may help people save £28 a year”

and “case studies had shown people could reduce their bills by about £100 a year”.

• Which case studies?
• By whom? (because there is a track record of them being by the same people trying to push some commerical deal … in this case, the eletric companies would be my likely bet).
• “could”. You also “could” win the lottery. Your point, Sir?

They could save even more if they used public transport, put on a jumper and turned the thermostat down a degree.

Energy efficient light bulbs use about 80% less electricity than a “regular” bulb. Aside from lighting, the overwhelming electric usage in our house is (a) boiler pump, (b) fridge/freezer (c) lights that can’t be converted to energy efficient easily.

Don’t get me wrong - I love our electrical usage meter. I’m a nerd like that. But a national rollout of them isn’t going to save “households” sod all. You can reduce your bills today by just walking around the house and switching stuff off you don’t need.

Tell me again who was saving here?

Energy suppliers, rather than distribution networks, will responsible for the roll out of the meters at a cost of about £340 per household.

They will be able to recoup the cost from customers through higher bills or upfront fees, but competition between suppliers is expected to ensure only some of the expense is passed on.

So, we’re going to have to pay an extra £340 in order to save, perhaps £28 a year?

Compeition my Arse

Now, what follows is a personal thing, so it may not apply to you or anyone else, but I share it for whatever it’s worth.

I spent about two or three days trying to understand the billing structures of three major electrical suppliers. They are insanely complicated, and they all work in different ways, applying different discounts and different levels to different usage patterns.

On an annual electrical bill of about £500, the ultimate difference between them (after you’d applied all their “specials” and what not), was about £1 or £2.

Now I might be a cynical old git, but here’s my view:

• The UK Energy regulator, OfGem are doing a lousy job of ensuring transparent pricing. No regular household has a sodding clue which supplier or tariff is better. Sure, “£200 off your bill” sounds great. But if you don’t actually get any savings, what difference does it make other than to fantasy?

• I find it rather suspicious that basically the tariffs all worked out at about the same level, when truely compared like for like. Either there is no point having different suppliers, they’re all in bed together to fix the prices, or else, well, I dunno? Suggestions?

• Go for the company that you think will provide you with the best customer service. Because choosing on price is like pissing in the wind. Find one with a call center that has intelligent humans on the other end. If your current supplier messes you about, switch based on service. Not the cost.

• Do not base your cost savings on what uswitch.com tell you. They are a commercial company who make money by getting you to change provider.

Competition my arse. Energy saving bollocks. This is about energy companies getting the government to allow them to increase bills, so we can pay for them to introduce digital meters that’ll mean they don’t need to send people out to read the meter. Which will increase their profits two fold:

• We’ll be paying for one cycle of meter replacements, which otherwise they have to pay for themseleves every few years.
• They’ll save the cost of sending out meter readers to each household.

The Energy companies have a cunning evil plan here. Continuously or otherwise the government have fallen for it hook line and sinker. And the BBC appear to have retyped a press release verbatum without much fact checking.

The energy companies will make a huge savings, and like I say, it’ll certainly help reduce our carbon emissions some by not sending people out to read meters.

But households will be paying more. Saving £28 a year is a joke (and the BBC News reporting here is a bit laugable too).

Finally, a good use for those massive screens the BBC have across the country that doesn’t involve sports.

Yeah, I know the math ain’t this simple and the numbers are a bit hand wavy, but hey ho.

news.bbc article UK rates ‘to stay low for years’ mentions a (real?) government goal

to slash the UK budget deficit by £100bn over the next parliament.

Another news.bbc piece talks about The Great British Fire Sale!! (£16bn assets sale).

Now, I grant you this is 2002 data, but the Guardian reckons the working population in the UK is ~28million.

So, let’s put all that together:

• 100 billion minus 16 billion (being generous, assuming we get that price and there are no costs that need to be offset against it)
• 28 million tax paying workers (I’m ignoring income from corporations … just because)
• 4 years (“over the next parliment”)

Helpfully, Google can do the math for us.

£750 per year, per tax payer., for four years. Or about £2 per day.

Note that this isn’t necessarily coming out of your pay packet. It could come from cutting services you use. But, on average, each worker needs to provide or save £750.

Not considered here:

• Corportation taxes
• Interest the government pays on that 100 billion “loan” until it’s paid off
• What we might profit (or loose?) from our investment in the banks

Scott Fotheringham, from carpenteroakandwoodland.com, on timber built supermarkets

Tesco announced plans to spend £100m on research into wind, solar and geothermal power, twice as much as Gordon Brown promised in the last budget. Interesting that Mark Soutar, Head of Environmental Construction for Tesco said that they got more publicity by sticking two little wind turbines on the roof of one of their stores which only powered the signage than any of their other environmental measures.

foreignpolicy.com reports:

The Soviet [… union …] actually built a doomsday machine that would guarantee retaliation — launching all the nuclear missiles — if the leader’s hand went limp.

Compare and contrast Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Same deal, about 20 years earlier.

I love that movie. To me it still remains a excellent contemporary commentary 45 years after it was made.

Interesting idea.

• newsrooms agree that, eventually, their source material will become public
• in return they get OCR, cross referencing and full text search (and the public hosting?) for free (or so it seems to me)

so it is the newsroom input rather than the output.

If that gains any traction, it seems to me that there are two likely outcomes:

1. Important stories will get discussed longer.

There will be the initial (commercially driven) headline grabbing, (advertising) paid splash. Then, when the documents go public, the rest of the population/bloggers can get stuck into the debate and slice and dice the data.

Thats good - more eyeballs, more discussion, more review. Plus, just setting information free in a digital format is a huge win.

2. “News” publications will win on the quality of their journalism

There will be the trash mags with sensational headlines. Then there will be those who are doing the old school jouralism thing. Investigating. Reporting. Doing the hard work.

Because they will be publishing their sources, those who do the best job will get the most respect.

And respect = eyeballs = profit these days. Just ask Apple (or Microsoft).

See also

whatdotheyknow.com, who are trying to become a central clearing house for UK Freedom of information requests. Like all good mysociety.org projects, they leave me thinking that really, this is what any modern government should be doing (or using our taxes to fund people like mysociety to do) on behalf of it’s population.

Namely, that in addition to making the laws that allow the Freedom of Information thing to happen, they should also be ensuring that once the information is out, it’s available for everyone to get at. That network effect thing. One of the central problems that whatdotheyknow is solving is

if I make a FOI request, and you want the same data, you have to make the request again.

How dumb is that?

Lord Saville, the chairman of the Bloody Sunday Tribunal has said

the [final] report, which will run into thousands of pages, must be with publishers for some months before it can be finalised.

I wonder how long it will take to put online?

Gotta love a good hack:

In the UK, there is a unique exception to the usual term of copyright for the work of J.M. Barry - the author of Peter Pan. His royalties are collected in perpetuity by Great Ormand Street Childrens Hospital

via the Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition

Aside from generally loving the man and all he’s done and stands for, Fry was also an early mac-head and early on the internets doing the online thing. Then he vanished for a few years, and now he’s back and it’s lovely (a delight) to see.

http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/09/11/dont-quote-me/

which links to

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/96631-story-collection-soars-after-fry-tweet.html

which to summarise:

A book of short stories has leaped up Amazon's book charts [rose by
nearly 250,000% in the Movers & Shakers list] to become second  only
to Dan Brown after Stephen Fry endorsed it on his Twitter feed.

And here is the thing - he’s got this huge following, invests his own time (and money) in his online presence, but doesn’t really benefit from it financially all that much, at least not directly.

On the other hand, he presumably doesn’t really need the money, seems to enjoy it, and it surely helps the Fry brand.

Yet the interesting thing is surely that one human, acting alone, via a free twitter account and without any organisation behind him has such influence.

It reminded me of one of my favourite Ted talks by Clay Shirky on institutions versus collaboration and following on in a similar theme Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody

ps. Thank you Mr Fry for your continued good will and wit :-)

pps. I wonder if Mr Fry would make more money in Amazon Associate referall fees from linking to his works or from the royalties?

3W Philips Econic GU10 replacement for the 35W halogen bulb. [via becky!]

£25, but a “glowing” review. Very exciting. Where do you buy?

Different, but related currentcost.com allows you to measure the electricity usage in your home without needing any electrical wiring - it is very very easy and safe to setup. Available via ebay.co.uk. Depending on who you get your electricity from, you might be able to get one free/discounted too.

It’s not an exact science, but it really does focus the mind and for nerds like me they are great. We’ve had one for about a year, and I love it.