this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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Humorous on face value, but that's not what utility companies do. In every utility district I ever lived (and it's a lot), if the meter readers were "unable" to read your meter, the consumption was estimated.
I had many conflicts about this because I traveled a lot for work and knew that there was no possible way I could have consumed as much electricity as they estimated. It turned it that meter readers could just claim the meter was inaccessible, and their job was considered completed.
Are there really people in the US driving from house to house reading the meters? In Germany you just get a letter (or an email nowadays) asking you to read the meter and tell them. Unless the values you're providing are obviously wrong, noone questions you.
If you lie there you'll be found out when you move out of your apparent or when the meter is changed after 20 or 30 years.
Here in Norway they changed all of our meters to a live upload of consumption. This allowed them to make complicated systems with increasing tiers of "grid rental" prices based on your maximum full hour of kWh consumption per month. My wife is paranoid about washing clothes while I am cooking or running the dryer while the washing machine is running etc. We don't even use that much power since we have external water based heating, so it really doesn't matter much. Fucking shit.
Recently we also got more and more smart meters here in Germany, as there are a few power companies that calculate your price by the hour. But that's not based on your maximum consumption but on the time of the consumption. If you use the solar and wind power on a windy summer day it's basically free, whereas the price goes up when it's expensive power from gas plants on a windless winter night. So you can lower your price by washing or charging your car at the right time.
That probably would not work that way in Norway as you have a lot of hydroelectric power which is available much more continuously, as far as I understand.
We have that pricing as well but we also pay a dynamic cost to be connected to the grid. When the power is cheap the grid cost is the biggest part of the bill.
With regards to our Hydro power: since the europeans took over we tap all of our water reserves and sell it cheap to the continent ever since the large acer cables came. When the winter comes our reserves are low and we buy expensive power back. It's been like that for a few years now. The government are looking into making a subsidy or tax break or something to compensate but EU is blocking it as market manipulation or something like that. It sucks ass.