Under the plans, each home would get a new smart gas meter and a new electricity meter.
For example, you can sit at home and pay to top-up your electricity meter or pay your cable TV subscription using Paga.
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To do that, however, the appliances around the home would need to be able to respond to queries from the electricity meter and adjust themselves accordingly.
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Census workers are being taught, for example, to look for clues that a house has two families living in it, such as an extra letter box or electricity meter.
Electricity demand per meter was significantly above average in the north of Scotland, but below average across most of the central belt and Ayrshire.
We can imagine the day when you'll be able to charge the battery on your plug-in hybrid car at night, because your smart meter reminded you that nighttime electricity is cheapest.
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The meter also quantifies the benefit of electricity generated by photovoltaic cells.
Healy and Brewster dream of people someday driving a fuel-cell car up to an Enernoc meter during peak demand and pumping electricity back into the grid.
With new chips and software, Eaton can meter and control the flow of electricity on plant floors to prevent sags and surges caused by lots of motors and digital devices starting up at once.
More intriguingly, the Kill A Watt meter will also tell you how much electricity you are wasting unwittingly.
ECONOMIST: The much-talked-of smart grid prepares to enter the home
Nuclear plants were expensive to build, but once in operation, their electricity was cheap enough, if never too cheap to meter.
The industry watchdog said no major supplier had equalised prepayment meter charges with standard credit for both gas and electricity.
Far better would be to have a smart meter in the home that told you how much electricity each appliance was using at that instant, and how much it was costing you.
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Nuclear plants were expensive to build, but once in operation their electricity was cheap enough for baseline power, if never too cheap to meter.
It said British Gas had equalised prepaid meter charges for just gas while Scottish Power, EDF Energy and Powergen had equalised charges for electricity.
Besides its meter boxes, one of the the hottest areas of growth is in systems that allow for prepaid electricity in parts of Africa and Asia.
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