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degggendorf t1_jeelo0p wrote

Reply to comment by BossCrabMeat in Meter replacement carries $200M shock: Rhode Island Energy’s advanced metering proposal ‘costs would be borne by ratepayers’ by york100

That's....not Murphy's law.

Besides, waiting for stuff to break then scrambling a crew for one-off emergency repairs is going to end up being way more expensive than methodically sending crews through each neighborhood to swap out meters.

edit: doing some math, this will amount to a cost of $380/meter to replace. There's no way an emergency break fix visit will be remotely that cheap. You'd be hard pressed to source parts that cheap, let alone the labor of getting an electrician to install them, and ignoring the cost and hassle of losing power when the old meter unexpectedly fails. Beyond that, the smart meters will be cheaper to read since it requires no time on site, not even a drive-by wireless read like ~50% of the meters have now.

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BossCrabMeat t1_jefp9c6 wrote

My name is Murphy, and that is my law.

So they'll add $380 to my bill, to make their lives easier and fire couple meter readers to save costs ?

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degggendorf t1_jefqi72 wrote

>My name is Murphy, and that is my law.

Hah, fair enough. I'm sorry to deny your identity like that. It was unfair, and I am sorry.

> So they'll add $380 to my bill, to make their lives easier and fire couple meter readers to save costs ?

Well yeah, basically. With a few extra notes that the owner will have a couple additional tools too, early replacement will reduce surprise failures, it will allow them to track and fix outages faster, and the cost savings will hypothetically pay for the upfront cost.

Then it doesn't seem to be part of the proposal, but these meters will also unlock the ability to have different rates at different times of the day, which can save everyone money by reducing peak loads, and help attentive consumers spend even less money on energy.

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BossCrabMeat t1_jefu81g wrote

Remember the "Federal telephone excise tax" that was imply to pay for the Spanish-American war, but somehow we keep paying for?

My fear is this is going to be something like that, "new meter charge", that will stay on your bill till 2354(that is the date a huge astroid will hit earth and end all life), because why not, we can .

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