The rollout of the highly touted Smart Grid ran into another buzz saw this week, this time in Texas, when a hundreds of consumers showed up at a town hall meeting, and the Grand Prairie City Hall, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, complaining that their recently installed wireless Smart Meters were responsible for higher electric bills. That led state senator Troy Fraser to get involved, asking the Texas Public Utility Commission to halt installation of the meters and to initiate an investigation.
The rollout of the highly touted Smart Grid ran into another buzz saw this week, this time in Texas, when a hundreds of consumers showed up at a town hall meeting, and the Grand Prairie City Hall, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, complaining that their recently installed wireless Smart Meters were responsible for higher electric bills. That led state senator Troy Fraser to get involved, asking the Texas Public Utility Commission to halt installation of the meters and to initiate an investigation.
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The meters were installed by the Texas utility Oncor Electric Delivery, which services roughly three million customers in the area. The company has installed nearly 800,000 of these meters and insists that they are highly accurate. They are now running a side by side verification study, where smart meters have been installed alongside the previously used mechanical meters and show little difference thus far.
That doesn't placate folks like Tricia Lambert, one of the hundreds who have complained, claiming, "My bills average between 1,500 and 2,000 kilowatt-hours, and it goes up a little more in the summer," she said. "That's pretty much where I stayed. The first month with the smart meter was 4,383 kilowatt-hours."
In some cases, like that of John Colbert, there were errors made by meter readers. An audit of his meter found that the smart meter was off by about 2000 kWh. Apparently, the meters are not read automatically. "Any time you’ve got humans involved in the process, there's always an opportunity for errors to take place," said Oncor spokesman Chris Schein.
This experience closely parallels an earlier story in Bakersfield, CA, where PG&E customers voiced similar complaints. Bakersfield residents believe their new smart meters are malfunctioning because their bills are much higher than before and they have filed a class-action lawsuit against the utility. An independent evaluator will be appointed by the California Public Utilities Commission some time this week. PG&E claims higher bills are due to rate hikes, an unusually warm summer, and customers not shifting demand to off-peak times when rates are lower. Likewise, in Texas, this past winter was unusually cold.
