If Your Electric Meter Is So Smart, Why Is the Power Grid So Dumb?

The meter at your home or apartment recording your electricity consumption is one of the portals to a clean energy future — and to consumers spending considerably less on their power bills.

But to get to that future, those meters must be able to provide up-to-the-minute data to you, your utility company, the plug-in devices in your home and the growing array of businesses that can analyze the data and help you save on your electricity bills.

For that to happen, though, your energy data must be available in a standard format. Right now, it mostly isn’t.

The Biden administration had the chance to accelerate that transition last fall when it awarded a little more than $1 billion in “smart grid grants” to nearly three dozen electric utilities to improve the efficiency of the power grid. As a condition of the grants, the Energy Department should have required those utilities to provide electric meter data in a “portable” format so the information could move easily among different software applications, platforms and services.

But it didn’t. As of 2022, about three-quarters of all homes in the United States had so-called smart meters capable of, at a minimum, providing energy use information by hour and most in real time. Until this data is standardized and widely available — a concept known as data portability — the power grid will remain dumb and unnecessarily expensive. The grid will also be less able to accommodate growing sources of renewable energy, which requires balancing supply and demand throughout the day as wind and solar power production fluctuate with the weather.

The records of your energy consumption contain tremendous value. Studies have shown that consumers can use this information to cut their household energy use by 6 percent to 18 percent.