Ecotricity Explains: Smart meters for a greener Britain
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You’ve probably heard the usual talk about how smart meters can help you save energy and money – but there’s a lot more to smart meters than that. They’re actually key players in greening up not only our energy grid, but the whole country.
Take control of your bills
When you have a smart meter, you’ll have an In-Home Display (IHD) too. This little handheld device provides your energy usage data in near real-time, giving you sight of your energy usage and how much it’s costing you. By keeping track of your energy usage, you can identify where and when you're using more energy and make changes accordingly, cutting down on not only wasted costs but also wasted energy.
Energy Savings Trust estimates that using your IHD can cut electricity usage by 2.8% and gas by 2% - with corresponding CO2 emission savings too.
Balance the grid
Smart meters send your meter readings across a secure, encrypted network to your energy supplier, giving them a clear picture of how much energy you’re using. This isn’t so that they can spy on you or see when you’re at home – this data is used to work out how much energy households and businesses across the UK need at a given time.
With this data in mind, we can generate and balance more renewable energy, which SMS estimate will contribute to a 77% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2035.
Carbon savings from your sofa
Since their rollout, it’s estimated that the smart network, run by the Data Communications Company (DCC), is saving over a million tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. That’s around the same amount of CO2 as you’d save from taking a million cars off the road!
Cutting transport
With your meter sending readings to your supplier automatically, we won’t need to send out meter reading agents so often. We’ll still need to send them out to check your meter is running as expected, but by cutting down on these visits, we’ll cut a huge amount of transport emissions.
The Smart DCC website has a handy widget showing the running CO2 emissions saved by smart meters on the DCC network over the past year.
Plus, you can take advantage of tariffs which are only available to those with smart meters, like our 1-Year Fixed EV tariff and some Time of Use tariffs, which we hope to offer in the future.
Get your smart meter today and help to green up Britain.
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