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JEREMY MAGGS: You might have heard that the Minister of Electricity (Kgosientsho Ramokgopa) has announced plans to install smart meters in homes in South Africa. The idea, as I understand it, is to remotely monitor and control the country’s geysers. The project is worth an estimated R16 billion and would enable Eskom to disconnect customers who exceed what is termed a responsible usage limit. Mark Allewell of Sensor Networks has some thoughts, and maybe Mark, the starting point here is to look at exactly how much electricity our geysers use.
MARK ALLEWELL: No problem. Your three- to four-kilowatt geyser, one geyser in a house, uses around about 40% of total household usage. So it’s an exceptional amount and if you look at the new increased rates from July, that’s between R800 and R1000 per month per geyser heating water.
JEREMY MAGGS: So the idea behind the electricity minister’s thinking, if I understand this correctly, is to remotely monitor and then control the country’s geysers in order to flatten the curve of peak consumption. Is the thinking behind that good?
MARK ALLEWELL: Ja, I think it’s incredibly good. We’ve actually been working with Eskom for about four years, trying to convince them the peak of geyser consumption and to try and off-peak the consumption, and nobody would listen really. I must congratulate the minister for actually putting this right to the top because he did say last week, it’s around about 10% of all household usage across the whole grid.
If you think what a geyser is, it’s really a kettle heating water.
So what you’re doing is you’re heating water for the whole day to have one cup of coffee.
It’s extreme and then, obviously, on the other side of that, you’ve got 50% of all insurance claims for water damage are through geysers. So it is absolutely low hanging fruit and there are very simple ways of switching geysers on and off and changing temperatures down. So I think it’s an incredibly good idea, yes.
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JEREMY MAGGS: So we can talk about how individuals can self-regulate the process in just a moment, but the fear obviously is the big brother concern that the smart meter would enable government at any point to switch off our hot water, removes our autonomy, and just as I’m about to get into my bubble bath, Mark, the water goes off.
MARK ALLEWELL: Yes, remember that he’s not switching [off] or he’s not planning on stopping your water. I totally agree, I think it’s wrong messaging from government and people are scared, they are anxious these days and certainly, hot water and WiFi are two very emotional subjects, and if you wake up in the morning and you don’t have hot water, it’s emotional.
So saying that government’s going to reach into your house and now control the heating of your water is quite scary.
Having said that, we have thousands and thousands of customers using our technology at the moment and they do this automatically every day anyway. We shift heating out of load shedding periods so that people have always got hot water. So the message should be that you’re always going to have hot water, but we are going to find ways of managing the heating at different times just to reduce those peaks because even with our data, we can see certainly on weekends, the peaks are gone and during the week, the peaks are massive.
So the message says you’re still going to have hot water and we’re going to find ways of reducing that peak so that you don’t have as much load shedding. People also need to come to the party, South Africa’s not unique, they do this all around the world.
There are big things happening in California with it as well, where they have these massive peaks. So it’s not unique to South Africa, it’s an international thing.
JEREMY MAGGS: So if I understand it then Sensor Networks is proposing individuals have the ability to self-regulate. If that’s the case, is there a quantifiable difference that would be made?
MARK ALLEWELL: Yes, so we truly believe that it should be up to each individual customer that wants to buy into this and that you can’t turn off everyone’s geysers. Everyone’s going to be quite upset. So we think that it’s an opt-in and there’s either a value add for the customer or they’re doing it to reduce load shedding.
But ultimately if the customer opts in for the service, then they’re giving back to the community.
As I say, we have a load shedding feature on our app at the moment where we heat water before load shedding happens. So for instance, if you schedule your water to heat between six and eight at night and load shedding is at six and eight, we’ll heat at five o’clock. So we’re actually doing this for thousands of people already and they’ve always got hot water. So it’s up to, I would say, up to people to opt in, and secondly to make sure that people have hot water whenever they need it and then there’s no issues.
JEREMY MAGGS: And is this a fairly easy process to implement once we get sign off?
MARK ALLEWELL: Yes, the hardest part is obviously knocking on somebody’s door and getting into their roof. It’s about a 45-minute exercise, this is a retrofit. We’re also working with some geyser manufacturers to build this in at OEM (original equipment manufacturer) stage so that it comes out as a standard connected product. We do think over the next few years this will be connected [not] just for energy consumption, but from an insurance perspective as well, blown geysers and water damage and things like that. So it’s a 45-minute install and it can basically save load shedding across South Africa.
JEREMY MAGGS: Mark Allewell, thank you very much.
