I am highly in favor of this type of self contained technology. The last thing we need is for the grid to become inadvertently dependent on the cell network, which is, in turn, dependent on the grid. If there’s a multi-day outage that takes out the cell battery backups, the grid needs to be able to start up independently. This is hard enough without accidental networking dependencies.
(I believe that at least some of the blatant inequity in the Texas blackouts was necessary for this type of reason. There were various critical facilities (gas pumping stations, for example) that, if shut down due to rolling blackouts, would have further reduced grid capacity.)
A surprising number of modern smart meters contain relays that can be used to wirelessly disconnect customers. I don’t know whether this feature is used for load shedding and/or startup, but it certainly could be.
As an aside, there are distressing reports of meter-associated fires. These seem to come in two categories: installation issues (poor contact between meter and socket) and issues with the relay itself. The former is not specific to smart meters per se, but the latter is. A device that can safely switch 100-320A at 240V is not that cheap and not that small, and I suspect that some smart meter manufacturers try to cut costs.
Can confirm the first part - had the utility turn on a meter remotely, so they can turn it off too.
Also, around here (Portugal) you're billed for the maximum power in your contract - it starts at 3.45 kVA, I think, with 6.9 and 10.35 levels commonly available (at 230 volts, that's 15, 30 or 45 amps). Used to be that a hardware circuit breaker enforced that limit, nowadays it's the meter cutting off supply in case of excess power draw.
I don’t know whether this feature is used for load shedding and/or startup, but it certainly could be.
The last two places I lived, it was.
In the more recent one, residential customers who didn't opt in to the smart thermostat, which allows the power company to override your temperature settings in an emergency, could be automatically cut off from the grid in a crisis.
In the older one, a factory I worked for was part of a program where they volunteered to be cut off from the grid remotely in the event of a power emergency. The factory got some kind of discount or rebate for being part of the program.
At least in my area they can. I have an agreement with the power company that they can shut off my A/C for up to, IIRC, 10 minutes at a time with some maximum total time off per day to load shed in times of high load. In return I get a discount on power during the summer months.
Except for the first year where there was a bug that turned it off for an hour at a time, it's never been noticeable.
This is almost certainly not a capability of your meter as such, though the meter might be used to pass data back and forth. Either your thermostat is being controlled (i.e., via changing setpoints) or there's a device somewhere in your HVAC wiring that the utility can communicate with. What is for sure not happening is remote connect/disconnect in the meter used to shed load.
Correct! I didn't think it was worthwhile making the distinction but there's a separate interface that the power company can control that switches the A/C. I think (been a while since I paid attention to it) that it only controls the compressor: the blower is still allowed to run independently.
I worked with a power company in New Zealand that had load shedding like this (although more for water heaters IIRC). They transmitted signals on the power lines themselves at a much higher frequency than the AC delivery. The end devices also needed to support it.
Not the most specific look at this question, but the facts are relatively clear.
“ The company halted operations because its billing system was compromised, three people briefed on the matter told CNN, and they were concerned they wouldn't be able to figure out how much to bill customers for fuel they received.
One person familiar with the response said the billing system is central to the unfettered operation of the pipeline. That is part of the reason getting it back up and running has taken time, this person said.
Asked about whether the shutdown was prompted by concerns about payment, the company spokesperson said, "In response to the cybersecurity attack on our system, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems."
At this time, there is no evidence that the company's operational technology systems were compromised by the attackers, the spokesperson added”
> If I don't get billed for my power usage then I'm 100% craning my AC, as will everyone else
Sorry, in what relevant scenario does the power company never get paid?
OP pointed out a potential feedback loop between the cell network going down and the grid failing. Are you suggesting everyone will crank up their AC when the network fails because the power company will have some difficulty collecting metering data that day?
If modern smart meters are anything like classic mechanical meters, they have a counter of the total amount of power consumed so far, and the power company bills the difference between the current reading and the previous month's reading. Which means that, once the meter can be read again, you will be billed for all the power consumed in the meantime.
Smart meters still retain the total overall usage. Even if the power company doesn't read it for 3 months, they'll see the increased usage the next time they come by and apply it to your next bill.
Most countries don't have the weird and insane rating plan that Texas did. What I pay for water/gas/electricity doesn't fluctuate 500% from hour to hour.
It's a violation of privacy - it makes it that much easier for people to see how much electricity or water you consume. It isn't necessarily a secret, but it is not so easy to find out when you have to go to a meter directly.
It definitely is enough of a matter of privacy that PGE wouldn’t reveal any details of the previous tenant’s usage patterns when I called concerned about the amount of energy we were using in our new place. If it’s too private to share in that context it shouldn’t be blasted out unencrypted to anyone with an antenna. (Also I realize we’re talking about Texas but I would assume/hope they have the same restrictions on sharing info as PGE.)
It often actually isn't hard for someone to find out even if you have one of the meters that has to be read by eye.
It is quite common for those meters to be placed so that they are visible from a public street or alley, so that meter readers can read them without entering the property.
Here is one electric company that talks about this in their meter reading FAQ [1].
> The numbers on a electric meter are clearly visible from six to ten feet away. And, by noting the position of the dial indicators, an experienced meter reader can accurately read an electric meter from as far away as twenty feet. We also provide binoculars and/or monoculars for readings beyond the range where the dials are not clearly visible.
Now imagine a technology that scans the contents, listing the type, number, and mass of each item, and broadcasts it so that anyone driving by can instantly read it.
It's not binary accessible v. non-accessible, it's level of effort.
But using your own argument, your electricity grid is now dependent on the road "network", so not self-contained. Moreover, I can imagine much worse scenarios than what you wrote about the cell tower batteries failing. Just imagine you have a snow storm and now you have to have a electricity company truck drive past people's home to restart their electricity. At least in the case of drained cell tower battery they only need to drive to one location.
The grid will work just fine without any cell connections.
The connection in home smart meters is used mostly just for consumption data and maybe remote diagnostics. In some cases it's used for load management, but this requires a written contract with the user.
Basically it goes "You let us turn off your AC/Furnace/other high load unit during load peaks and we'll give you a discount on your electric bill."
Just the information on which meters can't be connected to (due to cell networks being down) gives the power company a bunch of data on where the actual fault is located.
It's like the meter man visiting your house, but now they no longer have to enter. Isn't it wonderful? If I lived in the US, I'd immediately try to hack up a small Arduino project to read out my neighbours' energy usage.
I do this with a cheap (~$20) USB RTL-SDR – no Arduino or custom electronics necessary. Of course, I only use it to monitor my own energy usage (electricity and gas) using rtlamr[1] and a script that periodically sends the data to InfluxDB, then displayed using Grafana.
The result is a smart home energy monitor that doesn't require any clamps near the electrical panel, and it exactly matches the usage for which I'll be billed.
Crazy how easy that is. I bet within a year we hear about criminals using something like this to know when people leave their house for extended periods.
I've never had a meter reader enter any house I've lived in, which would be somewhere around 15 different units. All gas/electrical/water meters are on the outside of the house/apartment whether they were smart meters or the traditional ones. Anyone can walk up to them and read them. The digital or analog dial readout is not locked/secured/obscured in any way.
I use a Rainforest https://www.rainforestautomation.com/ device to read my own meter on SDG&E and it works, I think I had to go through an auth process though.
Indeed. I wonder if one could set up a fake transmitter that sends corrupt data (to lower one's own energy bill, hide a marijuana plantation, or to cause issues in a neighbor dispute), or what would happen if one would blanket jam the entire frequency.
Charges for fraud (in the case of false data) and disruption to electrical service at the state level, and charges for unauthorized radio interference at the federal level.
Worst case scenario isn't as far away as you might think. Consider that the FCC is pretty good at winning the cat-and-mouse game against pirate radio broadcasters. And those are people who can change their locations at will.
How long do you think it would take to go from the power company noticing an anomaly to someone walking down the street with equipment to detect the source? A week, maybe? There's money at stake, and these aren't stupid people.
Also not a very hard thing to investigate and track down for someone who is interested. I think a good portion of the readers here can design the equipment to do that.
The power company would notice the discrepancy between the sum of reported energy use of the houses vs the actual energy used in that neighborhood and track it down.
I wonder if they do any sort of audit of the amount of power used vs billed and, if so, at what scale. How long would it take them to identify the discrepancy? As long as it was pretty small-scale and not trying to hide a huge crypto-mining operation of something I suspect it would be a very long time before anyone figured it out.
That depends on the power company. But it's quite trivial to compare your average consumption with similar users and find the outliers.
That's how people who steal power get caught for example and grow-houses :)
And it's also a useful tool for the consumers themselves to know if they are spending more/less/equal amounts of electricity as people with similar profiles.
The older meters had serial-numbered lockout tags that would break if you attempted to remove them, that prevented access to the mechanicals of the meter under the glass. I imagine that the gearing in the meter had some mechanism to prevent a simple 'rewind' attack.
I also imagine (Hope?) that the power company would measure @ the pole level at some key points to make sure everything added up, and they have lots of data to help spot discrepancies.
It was possible to run them backwards. He mentions possible evidence this would leave behind, and notes (taken from the description):
> Latterly devices to detect this activity were added to meters in the form of non-resettable flags that would move out if the meter ran in the wrong direction, or in the case of digital meters a tamper indicator.
...though once this kind of attack became common, the utility meter manufacturers started adding anti-tamper features like hall effect sensors that record the presence of an unusually strong magnetic field near the meter equipment. You'd get some questions next time the meter reader came around and the tamper indicator was lit.
Utilities have a lot of financial incentive to keep people from (at least blatantly) manipulating their billing.
Yes but that’s one data point at one singular moment in time being collected by one person. Smart meters continually broadcast a constant stream of data to anyone who cares to listen.
Ha, interesting, if there really are no security mitigations, I can wardrive 2 days in a row and figure out which houses have very low power consumption, and deduce from that they are empty and I can go rob them. Ha, maybe even figure out if some power consumption means they have security devices, or just a fridge and a cooler.
And to make it worth my while I can just war-drive around the swanky areas of the city.
lol - I don't grow (obviously) but I know people who do (legally). They don't use LEDs, but I did use LED lights to grow some indoor veggies. From what I read (again I'm no expert) the low end LED stuff just doesn't cut it. Maybe there's a high-end LED market I'm unware of?
If you could design an algorithm for your wardriver gear, you might be able to detect when growers switch from 18/4 to 12/12 hour light cycles.
From my understanding, commercial grows all use LEDs. You can roll your own and buy 50w+ LED modules, old CPU coolers and constant current inverters to get as high-end as you want.
A lot of the all-in-one “grow lights” aren’t well evaluated, but I’m sure some out there get the job done.
Or you can just war-drive around collecting the high-energy infra-violet emissions that escape through the walls at night, finding out which houses are not occupied! OMG!
Also, please excuse my pedantry, but it is impossible to rob an unoccupied dwelling.
The range is pretty limited, and there's generally nothing to stop me from either walking up to your house and reading your meter directly or from getting a pair of binoculars and doing so from your property line.
How is this? I’ve never seen meters installed in the open with the display readable. Here in the Netherlands they are usually behind two doors. The front door and the door to the cabinet with all the meters and utility connections.
Depends on the meters. My electric utility just replaced their old (circa 1999) smart meters which were one way broadcast with a new smart meter that's supposed to be two way capable. I didn't notice a lot of change at their data collection base station (which happens to be at the corner of my driveway), so I don't know if they already had a transmitter in addition to a receiver, or if it's small enough to fit in the existing equipment box or if they're using a different station.
Well, looks like smart meters started appearing in US slightly later than e.g. here in Finland, around 2006-2007, so I'm not sure that explains the difference. Could be explained by lower mobile network coverage in U.S., I guess.
3x 63A is the reasonable maximum a normal consumer would want at their house. Normal houses are around 3x 32A.
Everything over that is a commercial building and they get billed with different rules and measurements due to the equipment they tend to have. Something about three phase engines and power phases in commercial lighting. I zoned out during those meetings :D
Finland has 230V, so if you're from the US with 110V the low current rating might be confusing ;-) I'd also guess that in Finland they also run three phases into each house/unit (we do in Germany), meaning that's 3*63A = 189A. (Or just shy of 400A on a 110V grid). For us that's the default grid connection you get for your house.
As for your guess: That's just a cultural thing I suppose. I've never seen outdoor meters around here.
The US is 240 volt for power purposes. The 120 volt thing is just dividing that in half - the meters don't measure that. These days most US houses get 200 amp service, but in the past 30, 60, and 100 were all common (100 is still done). I know of a few houses with more than that, but those are not normal.
3 phase is different from us split phase. In the us that would be 404 volts (or about that, I don't work with it just know it exists) or 208 volt if you that the split phase in 3 phase.
Anyway the point is 3 phase is not added in the same way as split phase. I think you know that, but I'm sure someone else doesn't.
Naw, Canadian. Cool to have 3ph at home (even without the #1 thing that fails here because we don’t have 3ph: a/c (capacitors)), but why’s your industrial supply just 400V instead of a soup of 347V, 480V and 600V?
Cellular being backdoored by design might have something to do with it too. Although I think it really is just a $$$ question; cellular providers didn't want utilities competing with handsets for service, so utilities built their own.
What the fuck