A plan to install a smart meter to monitor electricity use in every home in the country will be announced today by the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan.
The scheme is designed to cut electricity demand by about 10 per cent for every household. The Minister is expected to announce details of a pilot programme to install the meters in 25,000 homes next year.
The homes in the pilot project will be in varied geographic locations to get the best spread for a national roll-out over the following four years. The national roll-out of the scheme will be co-ordinated by the Commission for Energy Regulation with input from ESB Networks and Sustainable Energy Ireland.
Smart meters are designed to operate like fuel gauges in cars so that people will be told in an manner easy to understand how much electricity they use and at what cost. The programme is designed to help householders cut their costs by using electricity efficiently and in the process will help to reduce the country's level of carbon emissions.
The Government has a target of reducing emissions by 3 per cent a year during its lifetime. The smart meter will also enable people with solar panels or those using wind power to sell power back to the national grid. It will also provide energy suppliers with detailed information to enable better management of peaks and troughs in the usage of electricity.
In Britain preliminary trials by Carbon Trust showed that making small businesses aware of "time of the day" energy costs produced a 7 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.
The programme for government included this commitment to install the smart electronic meter in every home. A recent report for Energy Watch in the UK estimated that smart electricity meters would, on average, benefit customers between €50 and €60 a year, with an additional €5 per year from the social benefit of saving carbon dioxide emissions.
The main annual consumer benefits are from energy saving, reduced supplier and distributor costs ultimately paid for by consumers, and more sophisticated time of use tariffs. The report also said there had been a marked fall in recent times in the cost of smart meters, which were now in the region of €70, including the cost of the unit itself and installation and maintenance costs.
The annual running costs were estimated at just a few euro a year.
Households are responsible for about one-third of the nation's carbon emissions, and the Government believes that a focus on the need for greater energy efficiency in the home is a key element in meeting its international commitments.
Most householders at present have no idea what the electricity meter in their home means because it deals in kilowatt hours, which gives no indication of the costs of electricity being used.
