The Meter in the Basement

SPEAKER_06: There's a device in your home or attached to the outside wall of your home or bolted to a pipe in your basement that you have almost certainly never thought about for more than 30 seconds in your entire life. It's been running continuously without pause or your attention or a single software update or subscription fee. Hang on, it's probably coming. Measuring something invisible passing through it. It's been doing this since your parents were born. It does not have a screen, it doesn't send you notifications, doesn't have a companion app. It just counts slowly and precisely and completely without drama. It counts every cubic foot of gas that flows through it. And once a month, someone either comes to look at it or reports or it reports a number to a utility company and you get a bill. That's the whole relationship. And I find it one of the most extraordinary objects in the build environment. Think about it. It's invisible gas going through a pipe and someone's counting it. Like why don't we trust that? But we do.

SPEAKER_04: My mine uh at the other place I was at before we moved, because we had gas at the other place, was a big green box. It was a big giant. Yeah, it was like a big, you know, green garden green, you know, sort of box on the outside of the house. With a with a triangle key, you know, you could Oh yeah, you can yeah, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I and I I used to work for the a gas company, so uh. Yeah. Oh, that was a fun that was a fun gig. All right, so the diaphragm gas meter, which is the the design that sits in the majority of homes across the United States and a lot of the world, was patented in 1844 by Alexander Kroll and William Richards in England, of course, because you know, we've talked a lot about England, you know, being the source of all great things. The core operating principle.

SPEAKER_06: I don't think we talked about that. I don't recall saying that ever. Traffic lights, traffic lights. I have not.

SPEAKER_04: All right, go ahead. Okay, all right. Something else, too. There was something else that showed up in England. Anyways, all right. So the operating principle, it hasn't changed in 180 years. The two flexible chambers alternately fill and empty with gas, driving a mechanical linkage that advances a series of dials, and there'll be a counter or something like that. The mechanism, it's you know, it's elegant in the way that mature engineering is elegant because it's been simplified down to exactly what it needs to be and nothing more. There are meters installed in the 1950s that are still in service.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. 180 years. There's almost nothing in the infrastructure of modern life that's maintained fundamentally has been maintained fundamentally unchanged for 180 years. The gas meter sits in a category with the manhole cover, the fire hydrant. They're all objects that solve their problems so completely and so durably that the incentive to redesign them disappeared. Except that the gas meter is being redesigned right now in real time because the utility industry has finally decided that a device that requires a human being to walk to it and read it is not consistent with data-driven 21st century infrastructure. Imagine that.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, surprise. Oh my.

SPEAKER_06: And that redesign turns out to be a story about what happens when you tried to add intelligence to something that's been intelligently simple for nearly 200 years.

SPEAKER_04: What is what is the the like what's that that that standard for device metrics and stuff? I don't remember. S S and P. If it's not if it's not broke, don't SNMP simple network metric proto or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Gas meters? No. They don't have that.

SPEAKER_06: No, no. They can't send you a text. Forget it. Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_04: It's not hooked up to like, you know, dates, anytime. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: No, anything.

SPEAKER_04: The smart meter transition is one of the largest infrastructure replacement programs in the history of utility management. In the United States alone, there are approximately 73 million residential gas meters. Replacing them with communicating devices requires not just the meters themselves, but the communications networks, the data management platforms, the billing system integrations, and the regulatory frameworks that govern what utilities can do with the consumption data those meters generate. I gotta figure, McKinsey and the likes, they probably have made quite a lot on this project, haven't they?

SPEAKER_06: You sure Palantir isn't in the middle of all this? Oh, yeah. Kind of day they'd love to have. Doesn't it all start as a trust problem?

SPEAKER_04: Always, always. Okay, you before we start talking about the London streets. So I used to live close. There was one gas-lit lamp still left in the city of London. And uh and the way that those those lamps worked was by sewer gas. I know.

SPEAKER_06: Oh no, it was just it was an exhaust pipe for the sewer gas.

SPEAKER_04: But it's over, it's like somewhere on the strand or or off one of the little streets off the strand in Covent Garden. So yeah, and it still still runs today.

SPEAKER_06: Ooh, and for that you wanted to have the you came up with the best stuff ever in England. Like, yeah, you just put you just lit the pipes on fire because the stink wasn't as bad if you did that.

SPEAKER_04: Well, we did talk about the great stink. Yeah. Yeah, we did. I think I don't know if that one runs off of sewer gas or not. I kind of doubt it, but you know, whatever. Anyways.

SPEAKER_00: I got it right.

SPEAKER_04: The history of the gas meter begins with street lighting. We'll get, you know, loved it. Street lighting, it's awesome. Specifically with William Murdoch, a Scottish engineer working for Bolton and Watt in Birmingham, who in the 1792 demonstrates that coal gas can be produced by heating coal in a sealed vessel and then piped and burned as a controllable flame. The demonstration, you know, it's impressive enough that entrepreneurs immediately see the commercial application replace oil lamps and candles, which are expensive and smoky and require lots of maintenance, with a gas supply that can be piped to multiple fixtures from a central production point. By 1807, Paul Mall in London has gas street lighting. Paul Mall is really pretty too. Like, you know, you walk down there at night and stuff, and it still looks kind of kind of oldy. By 1812, the Gaslight and Coke Company is chartered as the world's first gas utility with the explicit mandate to supply gas to London streets and eventually its buildings.

SPEAKER_06: And almost immediately there was a billing problem. The earliest gas supply arrangements charge a flat rate per burner per quarter with a utility inspector visiting each customer's premises to count the number of gas burners in use. This works badly in every conceivable direction, right? Customers add burners without telling the utilities. Customers claim burners that weren't there to inflate service credit disputes. The inspector's count varies depending on which day they visit. The flat rate structure means that a customer who burns their lights 12 hours a day pays the same as one who burns them for two, which, say it with me, feels unfair. But most part but both parties for opposite reasons. The fundamental problem is that you're selling something invisible that invisible that flows continuously, and you have no mechanism to measure how much of it is actually moved. Again, why do we trust this? Today I don't understand why we trust it.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah. I love the billing, I love the billing aspect of this. It reminds me of another sort of billing kind of billing related thing in in English history, where there was a quote unquote window tax, and you would get taxed on the number of windows your building had. And so what did people do? They bricked up the windows.

SPEAKER_03: Of course they did.

SPEAKER_04: Of course they did. So so you'll still see that today. Like there'll be a building that some windows look like they're bricked up, and it's like, oh, well, that's from the window tax era.

SPEAKER_05: Oh my gosh. Okay.

SPEAKER_04: Avoid to avoid the billing problem, you just brick it up.

SPEAKER_05: Brick it up.

SPEAKER_04: Fair enough. All right. All right. So the wet gas meter is the first practical solution. And it's Samuel Clegg's. So he has it working by about 1815. Gas enters the drum divided into chambers, sitting half submerged in a tank of water. Each chamber fills with gas at the axis. The gas pushes the drum around, and the chamber empties out above the water line. The water becomes a seal. The drum is the measuring cup, basically. Every rotation is a node volume, so counting rotations counts gas. It works and it's awkward in lots of directions here. The tank has to stay level, the water has to stay at exactly the right height. Water evaporates, you know, and as the level drops, each chamber holds a little more gas, so the meter starts reading low, and utility is one of, you know, is the one losing in that situation. In the winter, it freezes, so that's no good. You know, it's a laboratory kind of instrument pressed into service as a commercial product, and you know, it obviously shows. So the meters are expensive, they're fragile, and they need regular attention from somebody who understands the particular quirks of that system. They work well enough to prove meterings is possible, and badly enough to create an immediate market for something better.

SPEAKER_06: And this is the point where it becomes a story about the social contract between a utility and its customers. And measurement is the thing that makes the contract enforceable. Before metering, the relationship is episodical by design. You know, isn't that like the old timey days? Like, like you were net like we talk now about like your customer's right.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Like, yeah, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_04: Customer-led product design.

SPEAKER_06: Right, yeah, no, no, no. We're gonna beat you to death, steal your money, and if you're still alive, you'll do it again. Like that's how it was. Before metering, the relationship was episodial by design. The utility didn't know how much you were using. You can't verify their billing as fair, and both sides have incentives to cheat. The meter creates the possibility of a relationship built on something other than suspicion. You use exactly this much, which we both can verify, and you pay exactly this much with follows from a rate structure we both agreed to. So it's a different kind of commercial relationships. And it actually arrives with the meter. We have nothing to argue about. There is no more bartering. I used it, I knew how much it was going to cost. Yeah, you know, and I paid my bill, so I can keep using it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: It's it's uh, you know, an early example of that exact arrangement. Uh, you know, this here's the here's the goods, very precise measurement. We agreed on a price, here it is. Alexander Kroll and William Richards patent a dry meter in 1844, so this is an improvement. And Thomas Glover, who claimed he'd got there first in 1843, so a year earlier, adds the practical improvements that turn it into the thing that actually gets installed, though. So for decades, the standard product is known as the Glover 2 diaphragm slide valve meter. It rolls right off the tongue there. Uh the operating principle is mechanical and you know it's pretty clever. So two flexible chambers, sheepskin at first, like a pair of bellows, all alternately fill with gas from the supply side and empty to the consumption side, driven by slide valves that the chambers themselves operate as they move. Each fill and empty drives a crank that advances a counter through a geared linkage. The volume of every stroke is fixed and known, so the counting strokes counts volume. So when you look at your gas meter and you see the number clicking away, that's like the gears clicking, clicking the uh the numbers around. And the difference from the wet meter is, you know, kind of you know, the whole story here. It's like no water, no nothing to top up, nothing to freeze, nothing that has to sit dead level, nothing that drifts out of calibration uh as it evaporates. It runs on press on the pressure differential of the gas supply itself, so there's no external power either. Uh you could put it on a in a wall and you leave it there, and that's why it wins. That's why it's the same functional design that's in production today. It's so good, it's so precise, so maintenance-free that no software updates, no firmware, no nothing. It just it just works.

SPEAKER_06: And the trust story doesn't end with the invention of the meter, though, because now there's a new trust problem. I mean, who do you trust to read it accurately? Meter reading is a professional uh of a profession emerges in the mid-19th century and it carries its own particular social dynamics. The meter reader has access to your home or your basement, knows your consumption patterns, as and is the human interface between you and an institution that many customers regard with suspicion. Yeah. I do. I do. I'm gonna put it out there. The accuracy of reading is unverifiable by the customer in the moment. The entire system is run on a chain of trust. The meter measures correctly, the reader reads it collected correctly, the billing system transcribes it correctly, and the utility charges the correct rate. Any link in that chain can break, and historically, Mark, every single one of them has.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, you know, meter fraud is as old as meters. Customers have been tampering with gas meters since they were first installed, inserting objects to slow the counter, reversing the meter to run the count backward, bypassing the meter entirely with an upstream connection. Countermeasures have evolved right alongside tamper evidence seals, anti-reversal mechanisms, bypass detection, periodic audit programs. I remember there was a lock kind of thing on our gas meter at our house when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you couldn't get them open, they came with a key.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's why the meter reader had to come. Well okay, but I can you imagine digging okay, because the gas line comes in from the curb. So what they're saying is you would dig up your front yard all the way down to the curb, put in a different pipe and bypass the meter. So you got a different pipe bringing the gas into the house from the like Okay. I wouldn't do that. I'd be afraid the neighborhood would blow up. I'm just gonna put it out there. I mean, maybe my piping skills aren't so great.

SPEAKER_04: I've s I I've seen people cut live, you know, gas lines before. It's not yeah. It's fine. It works.

SPEAKER_06: It's not fine. If it's metal and is there sparks, the neighborhood blows up. All right, down done. All right, wait, I gotta go find it again, but I'm oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_04: It's not it's not like the water heater, you know, explosion. Have you ever seen those videos? That's that's some scary stuff. You know, the steam pressure builds up in those.

SPEAKER_06: I've seen whole neighborhoods in San Francisco just go up. Just go up. I don't know if something's running a new gas line. Who knows what they're doing? Running fiber. I don't know.

SPEAKER_05: No. All right.

SPEAKER_06: Anyway, it's a permanent condition rather than an occasional incident, which is the part that surprised people. Every large utility runs a revenue protection team.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: And it isn't a department that gets stood up when something goes wrong. It's permanent staffing against a permanent problem. The loss figures they publish vary enormously, and they're all estimates because the nature of the thing that, you know, that you only ever count is the theft you caught. Like you don't know what you don't know, right? Like so you don't know how people are stealing it. You just know that if Renee No, so you would know if I all of a sudden my gas bill was gigantic, you'd know I must have turned the outside heat like hot tub on. Because that jacks up my gas bill by like 80 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's like I'd rather go sit in a tub. Like to be honest, it's just like there's no point to that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Well, I when I was working at a gas company, I mean the the meter, the meter guys had some really interesting stories about about various things. Oh, and they had these sticks with tennis balls on the end of them that they would carry around. Because they have to sometimes they the meters are on the other side of a fence, so they'd have to get they'd have to get access. And then the dog, you know, the theory.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Well, I mean, your dog, your dogs are a lot less threatening than some of the ducks.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, they're all little. They're punts, like, we're gonna do his gum ya.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Well, there was one that I can I just tell you this story real quick. Like there was this one guy he came to I think he was dropping off fencing. We were putting in a new fence. And it was it was that that vinyl fencing stuff. Yeah. Because it looked pretty, right? So we were putting it in and he comes to drop off all the parts, so he puts them all in the yard, and then they come the next day and put it all up. He was dropping it off, and um, I opened the door to see what he's doing. Like, because I he's just he backed a truck into my driveway and now he's hauling crap onto the yard. And I s and Molly got out. Now, Molly was at the time like a 14-year-old pug. Like she was I mean, she's mean, don't get me wrong, but she wasn't you can outrun her if you really wanted to. She wasn't committed to it. And she runs out the front door and I yell, Molly, no. And the guy drops everything and runs for the truck and he's yelling, Molly, no. I don't even think he saw her. He wouldn't have ran if he did.

SPEAKER_04: Exactly. Molly wasn't Molly wasn't exactly threatening. Even when she was barking at you.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. That was funny anyway. All right.

SPEAKER_04: All right, all right. So so the period from roughly 1850 to 1970 is the long plateau here of gas meter technology where the fundamental design is established and the work is incremental improvement only rather than some sort of reinvention. Sheepskin diaphragms of the original meters are progressively replaced with more durable synthetic materials as they become available, right? First falconized rubber. Yeah. There you go. In the late 19th century, then a succession of engineered elastomers on through the 20th century as the chemical industry produces materials with better fatigue resistance, lower permeability to gas, and longer service life. The countermechanisms get more precise, valve assemblies get more reliable, the enclosures get lighter and more weather resistant as aluminum, and then engineered plastics replace cast iron.

SPEAKER_06: The standardization history of gas metering is the invisible precondition for everything else. In the United States, the American Gas Association writes the early specifications, and they end up under ANSI, ANFI, as the B109 series, which sets accurate tolerances, test procedures, and performance requirements. In the UK, it's the British standards institutions. Their standards create regulatory framework within utilities and meter manufacturers operate, establishing what counts as a properly functioning meter. What accuracy drift is acceptable before replacement is required, how meters must be tested before deployment. Without standards, you don't have a market for meters because buyers can't compare products or verify claims. I don't buy that meter. I have no control over it. Not the smart one, not the dumb one. Like I got nut, like it just shows up. Like and I'm like, okay, I guess I'll trust it.

SPEAKER_04: It's it's like it's like a router, you know, that uh you buy. You know, you you don't own the router, you don't control it, you don't manage it. It's it's sitting in your environment. You know, it connects to it. And I subscribe it. I subscribe to it. Yeah, yeah. You gotta pay for the line. You gotta pay yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Hey, how come I can't send transactions down this pipe? I don't know, visa, you know. Yeah. They changed something on the router. Damn it.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. All right. The natural gas the natural gas transition in the mid-20th century changes the operating environment for meters. The manufactured coal gas that 19th century meters were designed for is replaced in most markets by natural gas from you know geological deposits. Natural gas has different chemical composition, different energy content per cubic foot, and slightly different physical properties than manufactured gas. Existing meters function with natural gas, but the energy content measurements. Changes because you're now measuring volume of fuel with a different BTU per cubic foot than what the billing system assumed. The industry responds by adjusting billing calculations rather than redesigning meters, which works, but creates a layer of computational complexity that sits between what the meter measures and what the customer is actually charged for.

SPEAKER_06: The index, which is what the utility indust the utility industry calls the register on the face of the beater, you know, those little dials with the numbers on them and the meter reader records. It's more complicated to read than it looks because alternate dials run in opposite rotational directions. So you have to read each one carefully rather than scanning them left to right. Like they're not all gonna go up or they're not all gonna come down. That comes straight out of the gear train driving the counter where the adjacent gears turn in opposite directions. Now think about this for a minute. I gotta read them weird because I can't change the way the gears work, because they're gears.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Like the legit gears, right? And I know a dreamliner flies on legit gears, like I get it. But like this seems sort of crazy to me that it's like so meter readers are trained to read the index correctly, and they occasionally get it wrong, which is the source of a whole category of billing error that utility customer service departments handle constantly. Constantly. I think he read that wrong. It can't be right.

SPEAKER_04: No, no. Yeah, definitely. I remember that working at the gas company that was that was a big part of it. Like you would see the training materials, and that was an application that they developed, and they had the meter readers, they had to certify on that all the time. They had to be tested and tested and tested.

SPEAKER_06: So yeah, it's just a little garbage in, garbage out, and that garbage in is gonna build somebody, and that's just gonna cost you a lot of work.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The service life of a diaphragm meter under normal operating conditions is typically between 20 and 30 years before accuracy drift and requires replacement. Some utilities run meters consider real longer than that. The combination of mechanical simplicity, no external power requirement, and mature manufacturing quality means that the expected lifetime of a property maintained gas, a properly maintained gas meter, approaches the service life of the building it actually serves. It's an engineering achievement, and as utilities begin to work out work out in the 1990s, a barrier to modernization. Suppress, suppress. You can't upgrade the data collection capability of a device that has no data collection infrastructure that requires no electricity and that works perfectly well without any modification.

SPEAKER_06: Okay, I'm just gonna put it out there. So does that server under Becky's desk. Leave it alone. I know it's load-bearing and really important to the company, but just leave it alone. We can't reboot it. We can't patch it, just leave it alone.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06: I understand it's running on Windows 95, but we need it. Just leave it alone. Like that no. No. If there's data on there we need for the AI, we're not going to be able to use it.

SPEAKER_04: Yes, but but like in this case, the meters, the meters have no connectivity infrastructure. You know, they're so it's so it's like if you took Becky's, you know, server under her desk and then just cut the cord. You know?

SPEAKER_06: It's well, okay. At least in that regard, it wouldn't matter if we weren't s doing security updates then, right? Like it's not connected to anything, so who cares, right? So like and maybe that's what I want to say about my gas meter. There's as long as it's not a smart meter, it's not hooked up to anything, so I'll have to keep it secure.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Anyway, let's talk about smart meter, shall we?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's talk about smart meters.

SPEAKER_06: The smart meter concept arrives the most, the way most infrastructure transitions do, on a change of priorities. The diaphragm meter measures gas volume accurately and durably, and it still does. What it cannot do is report that measurement remotely, report it frequently, direct unusual consumption patterns in real time, support time of use pricing, identify potential leaks from anonymous flow signatures, or integrate with the digital operational systems that utilities are building for everything else they manage. It's an excellent 19th-century instrument that is increasingly incompatible with a 21st century operating model.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. The first generation of automated meter reading, which the industry calls AMR. They're clever bunch of them. That's, you know, that's clever. Uh deploys in the 1980s and 90s and represents a relatively modest technical step. The mechanical meter gains an electronic pulse output that transmits a signal each time a certain volume increment passes through, and a drive-by reading system. Either a vehicle with a receiver or a walk-by wand can collect the reading without the meter reader physically accessing the meter. The meter itself is still mechanical, the reading is still periodic. The innovation here is entirely in the collection logistics, eliminating the need for the reader to access the meter location physically directly while keeping the fundamental measurement architecture unchanged. I I remember this. They had trucks that hook were hooked up with these antennas and stuff, and you know, they would have they would just drive through the neighborhoods and and it would, you know, pick up the signal and there it goes.

SPEAKER_06: Before I lived in East LA and I lived in a of they call them very established neighborhoods, which means you know you're living with everybody's grandma in East LA. And I was in a mid-century home that had just had a a refresh, right? So it's a ranch, it's 1200 square feet, it's one story. And I had an old as hell gas meter.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Old. I had to pay $75 to keep it. $75 a year I had to pay to keep it. And they're like, you can keep it, but we're gonna charge you a surcharge. And I said, okay, because I didn't want them to have my data. And I thought if it's if $75 keeps my data private, then I guess that's the world we're living in. So I gave them my $75, which meant nothing, Mark, because I went to a conference, came back, and that meter was gone.

SPEAKER_04: Well, there you go. We can talk about Samsung.

SPEAKER_06: To get onto the list to get it replaced faster. I think that's what I paid for.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: AMR solves the util again, the reason I'm saying this, right, is because you know, I had a meter reader for a long time. And when they they put in the smart meters, so peace those people were losing their jobs. For me to keep him, I had to pay them $75. And if enough of us didn't say that, then they didn't keep them. And so he lost his job even though Renee really, really wanted him. AMR solves a utility's labor problem without solving the customer's information problem. That's what I paid the $75 for, my information problem. I have one. The utility can now read meters more eff efficiently without dispatching readers to each location, but the customer still gets a monthly bill based on a single reading, still has no visibility into their consumption patterns, and still has no mechanism to respond to price signals in real time. If I knew my bill was going up in the middle of the month, maybe I'd quit cooking. Huh? Huh? Good idea. I wish I knew. The value of the data is captured entirely on the utility side. This matters because the policy argument for smart beaters, the one the regulators use to justify the capital investment to the ratepayers who are ultimately paying for the transition, depends on demonstrating consumer benefits as well as utility operation benefits. I don't see anything. I can't curb my usage in any way. I don't know what my neighbors are doing. I have no idea, but that's okay, because you know everything.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, the closest you get is sort of like on a on the electricity side, peak use, you know, hours, you know, non-peak use hours, whatever.

SPEAKER_06: Um on the electricity side, they're they were forced by the public utility commissions of the state of Massachusetts to dump that data, like dump the real data, like for real, right? And they anonymize it and they anonymize it all the way down to zip code. So you'll see Street 1, Street Two, Street Three, Street Four, and then you'll see house one on street one, house two on street one. You'll see them like that. And they're just it's dumped into this. Oh, I should go dump one. I should look at it with um with AI, it would be fun. Anyway, they dump it into this giant like spreadsheet and you can download it. Once I have it though, if I knew who you were in that zip code and what that street was, I could watch you walk around your house.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: It reads the electronic signatures so well that it can tell you what TVs are plugged in, whether they're running, how long they've been on. They collect that data like crazy, right? So yeah, like I feel in the end, I'm just gonna say this, that like they have so much data that if they're not can if they're not careful, they end up with the same kind of reputation that Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have there. They need to be careful. Renee said it. Boom. This is what this is the downside of being an analyst. You're just like and I don't care what you think. Just what it did. Yeah, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_04: It's not all bad here. It's not all bad. All right, so advanced metering infrastructure, AMI, instead of AMR, right? Is the second generation and it's more fundamental, it's a more fundamental transformation. An AMI gas meter is a digital measurement device with an integrated communications module that connects to a wide area network, you know, 4G, 5G, something like that, logs consumption on schedule, and takes commands from utilities' head-end system. It can be read remotely without a site visit, you know, or dudes driving around in trucks. It can report tamper alerts, low pressure events, unusual consumption, uh, and it can support time use of price, time of use pricing, which the meter is now tracking when gas is used and and not only just you know how much.

SPEAKER_06: So they're gonna use that meter against you because you used it during peak hours. So you're gonna pay more money for that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, true. You know.

SPEAKER_06: I don't like that. Not when Elon Musk is running the same crap at the peak hours and he's not paying that much for it. Like you see what I'm saying? Like it's not okay. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. But but a gas meter has a constraint and an electric meter doesn't, right? And and it's, you know, kind of around this whole design. So an electric meter is sitting on a power supply. A gas meter runs on a battery that has to last 10 to 15 years in a basement. Nobody visits, right? So the radio can't stay awake. Most gas AMI readers, meters log hourly and wake up once or twice a day to send a batch. The 15-minute interval reporting people associate with smart meters is it's it's on the electric side of the house. Gas is a much thinner stream of data, and the battery is the reason, right? It's the limiting factor. Remote shutoff exists on some gas meters, but it's not universal. Uh you know, the so many old antique gas meters exist is far from universal. And it's also asymmetric. A utility can close a valve remotely. Turning the gas back on means sending somebody out to relight pilots and crank the thing and whatever. Because you can't safely restore gas to a building with nobody standing in it.

SPEAKER_06: Aaron Ross Powell The communications infrastructure question is where the smart meter transition gets complicated because gas meters are offered often in locations that are difficult for radio frequency communications, like they're inside buildings in basements, in meter pits below grade, in dense urban environments with a lot of signal interference. The cellular networks and mesh radio networks that work well for electric smart meters, which are typically on the exterior buildings, work considerably less reliably for gas meters than their typical installation locations. Different utilities have adopted different communication approaches, some using unlicensed radio frequency mesh networks, some using cellular connectivity, some using power line communication through the electric meter infrastructure. And the result is a fragmented communication landscape that complicates the interoperability of meters and head in systems that cross different utility territories.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: The privacy question around smart meters is real. We talk about that all the time. We could probably relate electric smart meters to just about everything we talk about. Yeah. You sound like Marge right there. But it is worth being precise about what you know where the privacy issues actually sit. Because, you know, it it is it's not exactly a gas question yet. So a gas meter reporting once a day tells the utility very little about your your your daily life. Because, you know, it's a batch system, it's measuring it in kind of sparse intervals. An electric meter reporting every 15 minutes tells a lot, a great deal, because electricity is where all the appliances are. And interval data at that at that resolution is enough to infer when the house is empty, roughly how many people live in it, you know, w when somebody cooked, when somebody was up at 3 in the morning, what TVs were on, lights, you know, all of that.

SPEAKER_06: Whether there's a grow operation in the garage. Yeah, of course. That's how the DEI finds people all the time. They just go look at the electrical bill. Like, why is why are they running this? They look and they're like, oh, it's a grow lamp. Let's go ts you know visit.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. The the gas version of the problem is ahead of us rather than behind us, though. So there's real pressure to tighten the reporting interval for leak detection. And if gas metering moves to something close to real time, it inherits the same exposure that electric meter already has. So several states have written privacy rules covering interval consumption data, and those frameworks are still being argued over. And the direction of travel matters more than you know, either there. As households electrify their heating, cooking, and hot water, the gas meter stops being the you know interesting device here, right? Because there's nothing left running through the gas meter. Whatever the exposure is consolidates onto one meter that's already reporting every 15 minutes. Like for my house today, I don't have gas anymore at this house. I have oil, which is a whole different problem. But you know, particularly in the States, you know, the the use of natural gas ranges, for example, is you know, starting to disputate.

SPEAKER_06: I still have one.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I love I mean, come on, you know.

SPEAKER_06: You can't you're not allowed to buy them anymore, though. Yeah. Right? Like you're not allowed to buy them anymore. So if you residential, now like professional kitchens are still allowed to have them, but like but but they link it to asthma and other stuff in kids, like just having the pilot light light on constantly, right? So I get it. Like, and you're right. I you know, but at the same time, like my electric pill is more than my gas pill.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, of course. Of course.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so I can't imagine having everything on that. Like gas gas heats heats the pool. Gas, you know, like like we use it for other stuff.

SPEAKER_04: I I remember in the States, you know, it's particularly in the house in in Colorado, like gas was super cheap. So it's like, what other things can I put on gas, you know? And we converted and my my stepdad, because we had a gas dryer when we moved from California to Colorado, and they didn't have a gas um outlet on the line. Oh so he so he cut a line. So there, you know, it's like, oh well, you know.

SPEAKER_06: Did he quit a line for outside too so you could just hook the barbecue up to it? So I don't understand why people don't do that.

SPEAKER_04: Well, you know, we didn't know yeah. But that would have been useful. I think actually there was a tap for for external gas outside. Yeah. But I was like, oh, let's, you know, what can we put more on? Can we put can we run our air conditioners on gas? But I think the pricing dynamics probably shifted, you know, but I I don't yeah, I don't know where I mean, I haven't lived in the States for you know over ten years, so I don't know. Yeah, all right. Anyways.

SPEAKER_06: There's also a cybersecurity dimension that didn't exist when the infrastructure was a mechanical device with no network connectivity. Yeah, that's why I miss the old days. Somebody said, like, like what do you do like to to like embrace analog? And I said, I never travel without a yo-yo. Like I always have one. Like, you can't steal my identity. It's not a thousand dollars if I lose it. It keeps me busy. Like it I I never like every purse I have has a yo-yo in it. So there you go. I've no smart meter network.

SPEAKER_03: But I have a yo-yo.

SPEAKER_06: Right? Yeah. Like I don't know where I'm supposed to be, but I'm having fun. A smart meter network is an industrial control system attached to a gas supply infrastructure, and it takes commands from the utility head end where remote shutoff valves are fitted. That's the physical action on a gas line reachable over a radio network, which is a category of risk the old infrastructure simply didn't have because physical access was required for any intervention at all. We could say the same thing about gas pipelines, right? Like it was the same thing. It like it was IT versus information technology versus OT, operational technology. Operational technology moves levers. Yay. And usually, because that was a closed network and it wasn't attached to the internet, none of us knew about it. IT people didn't bother with it. Like we were like, whatever, right? And then all of a sudden they were attached to the internet and then and then it was just awful.

SPEAKER_04: And then Target got uh got jacked.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah. Security researchers have found vulnerabilities and deployed smart meter systems, and utilities have had to build security programs for meter infrastructure that they never previously needed. Welcome to the total cost of ownership of the 21st century.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Interval data creates analytical capabilities, utilities are still learning to use, and I would say exploit. Consumption disaggregation, working out which appliances are running from the shape of the curve is well established on the electric side where the data is fine, you know, is fine enough to watch individual appliances switch on. On gas, it's cruder because you've usually got hourly totals, you know, batched up and sent on, and only a handful of gas appliances to tell apart, right? A furnace, a stove, whatever. Uh a furnace cycling looks different from a water heater recovering, and a range looks different again, but you're separating three or four things rather than 30, you know, TVs and microwaves and all that. It's still enough for demand forecasting, efficiency program targeting, and spotting equipment that's failing, though.

SPEAKER_06: The equipment failure side of this is the one that matters from a safety standpoint, though. A meter reporting daily instead of monthly can catch a slow leak or a failing appliance weeks earlier than a monthly read would. And if the interval tightens further, that window shortens again. The utility has historically no visibility at all into what happens on the customer side of the meter. They see a total once a month and nothing else. Even a daily figure creates the possibility of a proactive relationship with gas safety that was never structurally impossible before.

SPEAKER_04: The longer term question for gas meter technology is what decarbonization policy does to the asset base. Most developed countries have stated policy goals for reducing natural gas consumption in buildings through electrification of heating and cooking as part of climate commitments. If those policies are fully implemented, the 73 million residential gas meters in the U.S. become standard, stranded assets, replaced on a different schedule than their natural service life by a policy-driven transition rather than a technology-driven one. Utilities are currently making capital investment decisions about smart meter deployment against a backdrop of real uncertainty about the long-term future of their core product. That's an unusual planning environment for infrastructure that that is meant to serve for 20 to 30 years. Similar thing is happening in Europe, in a different kind of way, different country to country, because of the use of natural gas in different countries. I'm not even on the network, as I said, right? I've got heating oil, which it's a 2,500-liter tank. You know, there's no nobody's put a smart meter on it. You know how I tell if okay, there's this kind of cool how do you tell if you're you you can't see in the tank, you know, because it's dark. You know, you can open up the big thing, you like look down. I don't know, do I need oil? I don't know if I need oil. So they so they cut these little holes in the top of it, and then you put this, like screw this little device on there, and it shoots like a like a s like you know, all a sound or something like a little like a Doppler. Sonar. Yeah, so yeah, kind of like sonar. And it and it it knows, you know, you tell it how many liters your tank is and roughly the dimensions of the tank, and then it goes and and you know, the echo, it records the the sound and then the echo, and that Doppler shift is what it tells you, oh, you're 50%, you know, fill or not fill.

SPEAKER_06: So you figure out whether or not you have enough oil the same way they found the Titanic. Yeah, like figure like you can repurpose that technology to tell him when he needs more oil.

SPEAKER_04: And it's got a little you know, it's got a you know, it it also is like a battery thing, and it'll just kind of pulse every couple of hours. And then in my utility room that's closest to the the the oil tank, there's a little thing you plug in and it has a little antenna on it, and then it has a little L C D you know, kind of display. It looks like a calculator or whatever. And it has a gauge, looks like your cell phone, you know, bars on your cell phone or whatever. And that's how I know. Oh, uh that's down below the down below that line. I better go Order 500 liters of oil.

unknown: Wow.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so it's very much much lower tech even than than uh some of the things that you see. Anyways, I'm not on the network. You know, if I wanted to replace a boiler tomorrow, it would be it would be a heat pump or you know, some sort of electric system rather than gas. So the meter that ends up carrying my my house is you know, it's not it's not gonna be a gas meter, right? I'm not gonna I'm not gonna ever put gas into this house. And likewise across you know the the UK, you know, you're not not doing new gas installations en masse. And that's the position a lot of households are drifting into, regardless of you know what what country you're in. The utility making a 30-year investment decision has to guess how many of us there are in that sort of situation.

SPEAKER_06: And there's something sad about that from the meter's point of view. I mean, I don't want to pity the meter, right? But the diaphragm design has been running continuously and reliably for 180 years. A piece of Victorian mechanical engineering that outlasted the empire that produced it, and the fuel it was originally designed to to measure. Like that piece of hardware is doing just fine, even though we've all moved on from gas, right? Like that's a shame. That is a shame. You know, the smart meter that replaces it will have a shorter design life, a more complex failure mode profile, a richer data output, and a more uncertain future. It's better in almost every measurable dimension, and it depends on software updates, communication networks, data centers, private f privacy frameworks, that all could change. The old one depended on the gas pushing through it. Like there's something elegant, sweet, nostalgic and private about that.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: I mean, especially thinking about I mean, I I work in financial services and we talk about oper operational resilience all the time. And complexity is the enemy of you know reliability. Reliability. So like, you know, okay, it's a more complex meter. It does more, but it's a more complex meter, therefore it's less reliable.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Like I don't I mean, uh you probably that house you you lived over on off of LeBray or whatever, like the that that old one, like there's no way that you probably ever had to do anything with that that that meter. I mean, I lived in my my parents' house, you know, in in California, you know, when I was growing up. Like there's never once. Yeah, never once.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: No, they build you quarterly. They came once a quarter, did the read, and then they got built quarterly, whatever. Yeah, no. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Like, and so your smart meter, whether it's electric or gas, it gets installed and i i y it's it's gonna something's gonna break, something's going to go wrong, something won't work, you know, at some time in its life, you know, in a much shorter life. So yeah. Anyways. Alright, so the gas meter's history is a very clean example of a pattern that runs through the history of infrastructure technology. We love infrastructure.

SPEAKER_03: I know, I do, I love it. I know, it's great.

SPEAKER_04: The device solves the original problem simply and durably. You know, the the the pro tends to persist in to it for an extraordinary length of time, long past the point where more capable alternatives are technically feasible because the original device's simplicity is itself a feature. Reliability, low maintenance cost, long service life, and independence from external systems are valuable properties. And they're easy to undervalue when you're comparing them against a technically superior alternative that also introduces new dependencies and new failure modes. Plenty of people have designed something better. The diaphragm meter persists because it's very good at the one thing it was asked to do.

SPEAKER_06: A trust argument that I started with in the history section keeps reasserting itself at every stage of the meter's evolution. The wet meter solves the trust problem between the utility and the customer by creating verifiable measurements. The standardization movement solves the trust problem between utilities and regulars by as regulators by establishing what accurate measurement means. The smart meter creates new trust problems around data privacy and cybersecurity, even as it solves the operational problems of the old infrastructure. Every generation of the technology inherits the trust architecture of the previous one and it adds a new dimension to it. The meter is a trust device. Oh my god, do you hear me, utilities? The meter is a trust device, a physical instantination of the agreement between a utility and its customer about what was delivered and why it was owed. You want to build me, make me trust where that's coming from. And I like that idea. Don't don't we say this all the time. Don't we say this is what technology does? Like the technology moves ahead, right? And then like, and then we take the same old problem that we've we've always had for a thousand years, we just solve it with new technology. It's still a problem. We're gonna solve it again in ten years with new technology. We just keep going and going and going, right? And I guess this is no different.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the trust, the trust, you know, I and I'm not sure I would say a trust problem, right? It's a it's a trust question, right? And the trust question is It's a trust obligation.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah. Obligation.

SPEAKER_03: That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_06: Like it's not on me to for me to trust you. I I shouldn't have to be like, I'm gonna put aside the fact that you know too much about me and yeah, we'll be friends. Like, no, no, no, no, you need to earn that. Like, tell me what you're doing to earn that, right? It's not that's not a one-way street.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. But and that that doesn't like every every incremental or even generational change of the technology, the tr the trust obligation remains. It doesn't like and and probably even broadens, right? The the evidence around the obligation broadens. So anyways, all right. So the device in your basement that you have never thought about is doing something sophisticated, right? It's measuring a physical quantity accurately enough to be legally defensible in a billing dispute. It's doing it continuously without external power. It's been doing it potentially for you know longer than you've lived in your home. And it's about to be replaced by something dramatically more capable that will generate a continuous stream of data about your domestic life and transmit it to a server somewhere. In the cloud, of course, right? Which would create efficiencies and capabilities that the old device couldn't support and privacy implications nobody has fully resolved. You know? Both of those are progress, I guess.

SPEAKER_06: I guess. I don't know. 180 years and almost nobody has ever looked at one on purpose. I mean, I have you ever stood in front of us and said, I wonder how this works. Like, no, nobody does that. The oldest technology in our lives are usually the ones we notice least, which is either a tribute to how well they work or a reminder that the things closest to us are sometimes the last ones we think you examine. Either way, the me Oh. Either way, the meter in your basement has a story. I'm thinking, oh, it's probably true about people too. Either way, the meter in your basement has a story. And it's better, it's a better one than you expected from something that spends its whole life counting.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's just it just counts. It just counts.

SPEAKER_06: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Ladybugs came to the ladybug picnic. I'm excited for it.

SPEAKER_04: If you've ever gone to your basement to read your gas meter and not understood which direction to read the dials, uh, you're not alone. I I've l I've done that. I have done that. And the alternating rotation design is is why, right? And it's been confusing people since the first dry meters went in.

SPEAKER_06: If a utility company has ever estimated your bill because the meter reader couldn't ac access your meter and you felt vaguely wronged by this, the smart meter is eventually the solution to your problem, and it'll arrive sometime in the next decade, give or take. Congratulations, I'm not sure. You're really just trusting them on that house full of kids who shower like have enough you trust in a pool? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Okay. So so yeah, six people living in the house, seven right now. And yeah, we so every time they come, the because they hire these data data businesses to come and read the meters, right? Oh. And it's the same company that read my gas meter at the other house we lived in. And the guy shows up, knocks on the door, hey, I'm here to meet, read your water meter. I'm like, good luck. And they go, Well, where is it? Don't know.

SPEAKER_06: I don't know. You might want to tell me on your way out so I can help the next guy.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's literally like they have pictures and stuff, and they're like, and I look at the pictures like, I don't know where that is. Sorry, man. And and they're like, Well, can we look around? I'm like, you're welcome to try. There's six acres out here, you can wander all you want.

SPEAKER_06: I don't know where it might be.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And they never found it. They've never we've lived here board two years now, and uh two and a half years, and they've never once found it. So I don't I have no idea where the water meter is. And and so they put you on like a like a minimum estimate bill or whatever, which is fine. Yeah, it's fine. Anyways, all right. You have a gas meter that was installed before 1990, and it's still running accurately. You're in possession of a piece of Victorian mechanical engineering that has outlasted empires, and it deserves a moment of your attention.

SPEAKER_06: But don't stand out there and admire your smart meter. It doesn't deserve your admiration until they sort this out. I'm just gonna put that out there. This is the nostalgic nerds where the infrastructure you have never thought about turns out to have a history that's worth knowing. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, and share this with someone who definitely never looked at their gas meter and should. We'll be back next week. Thanks, Mark.

SPEAKER_00: I got it right.