Smart Meters: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Electricity - Smart Grid (R) Evolution: Electric Power Struggles - page 106

2013 ) . Although the capacity for smart meters to reduce in-home electricity use simply by
automatically adjusting the timing of appliances in the home is mentioned prominently in
media coverage about smart grid, actual deployment of smart meters with these consumer
interface tools and sale of accompanying (and often more costly) “smart appliances” that
enable this level of control are still limited across the United States (Navigant Research
2014 ) .
When considering the environmental and economic smart grid promises associated with
more efficient use of electricity, the capacity of smart meters to influence how individuals
and households use electricity emerges as a critical component of smart grid. Smart
meters are often considered the critical technology, with huge potential to promote energy
conservation practices and change patterns of electricity demand. These high expectations
of smart meters are based on conventional wisdom which often assumes that electricity
consumption is determined by rational individual choice and that information and
economic incentives are key to influencing those individual choices (Darby 2006 ). Recent
research challenges these assumptions by providing new understandings about the social
complexities of behavior change and electricity use (Brown 2014 ). We now know that
electricity consumption patterns are embedded in social practices that integrate many
drivers beyond rational individual choice; supplying information and creating economic
incentives for making different choices will not necessarily lead to straightforward and
intended behavior changes (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012 ). Despite this awareness
among those who are advancing knowledge about the relationship between technology and
socialchange,smartmeterdeploymenteffortscontinuetoassumethatinformationanddata
have a high potential for shifting and reducing electricity consumption patterns.
Beyond differences between Europe and the United States regarding the prevalence
of in-home displays in smart meter programs, another difference relates to methods of
communication - that is, whether smart meters use wireless or wired technology. Due to
differences in existing IT and electric infrastructure - in particular, more undergrounding
of electricity wires in Europe - more European smart meters rely on communication
along hardwired power lines or power line communication (PLC), which does not require
wireless technology. In the United States, however, where there is less undergrounding of
power lines, smart meters most often rely on wireless communication. It is this reliance on
wireless that has been the source of much of the health concerns associated with smart grid,
related to the electromagnetic radiation emitted through wireless communication (Hess
2013 ) .
The smart meter is not a singular, static technology. Different types of smart meters are
being installed in different places and the technology is rapidly evolving as new designs
emerge to suit different contexts. In addition to bidirectional communication, which is