Please Blame the Deregulation and Regulation Fiascos Parte 38

Len Gould responded to Dick:

Dick: My main reason for requiring a complete implementation of market-ready meters to everyone is fairness. I can't imagine any way that a market can work equitably for everyone if only the few largest customers are participating. The whole enterprise depends on providing short-time price signals to all customers. Without that, you must provide some form of regulation (affecting all customers, including those few large ones, meaning it's not really a market and I'll oppose it.)

"I would rather let retailers deploy meters meeting specified industry standards". That is all I'd intended to say in the proposal, a standards body establishes a minimum functionallity which will meet the definition of "market-ready meter", then distribution or retailer or whoever is responsible for installing the new metering system is free to purchase those new meters from any manufacturer meeting the standard. Obviously it would be a waste of resources to deploy say 15% units which communicate wirelessly in an area where powerline carrier is implemented, so likely the communication system should be standardized by geographic resion as well. A third point is integration of gas metering communication and marketing system into the same communication infrastructure. Once the electrical meter can communicate, then adding the gas meter data will cost very little. As small residential-size gas-fired CHP units develop as they should for energy efficiency reasons, gas an electricity will naturally integrate seamlessly into a single energy market.