In all the years I’ve watched the forum, I think I’ve never heard of a person who actually had Sense built into their utility smart meter.
So, for all this talk about increasing market access by eliminating the standalone monitor, how many forum participants are using Sense built into the meter vs. standalone?
I would love to know.
From what I understand for now it’s only 2 utility companies in a couple states.
The ‘State’ will pay Sense based on how much consumers reduce their energy usage. During times high demand Sense will get paid if customers reduce certain loads.
Similar to how some utilities offer customers a couple dollars for being able to remotely control their ‘smart’ thermostat turning the AC up a couple degrees during peak demand. Sense will get paid if customers conserve energy during these times. Hence why Sense put some effort into trying to natively detect Heat Pumps.
With the push the electrify everything the grid will be extremely taxed during winter especially in states like NY which is still trying to ban Natural Gas and propane in new builds forcing everyone to install Heat Pumps. Without extreme measures (and even with) there WILL be brownouts and blackouts in the middle of winter and people will die. More than the few times a year the power goes out as is from downed lines, etc… Those in rural areas will really suffer. Fortunately we have natural gas, a wood burner, a portable generator, the knowledge and ability to use them. Unfortunately those who will be stuck with only electric likely also lack basic survival skills and common sense.
Utilities in states like NY have raised their rates nearly 70% in the last year and are hiking them another 30+% next year. Customers are going to be paying double than they did 2 years ago with most going to delivery and mandatory ‘green energy’ programs. Electrification of everything is simply not feasible. This is why so many people are livid over this regardless of politics… We have our Heat Pump set to cooling only, using Gas for heat, hot water, dryer, etc…. Even before when we had a 25 year old furnace and little insulation our combined gas bills for the entire year is lower than our lowest two months electric bills. I can’t imagine being forced to use only electric… Nor can I imagine how high our electric bill would be if we didn’t have Sense to help be more conscientious.
Now if this quagmire somehow happens and Sense ups it’s game, it would allow Utilities to implement load based demand pricing. States could implement new fees. They could also tailor rebate and incentive programs based on actual device usage.
A lot of this would be very far off as (we all know) Sense is far from being accurate at the device level and living up to the hype. I suppose everything has to start somewhere.
These states must be offering quite a bit (out of desperation) for Sense to make such drastic changes to eliminate the Home Monitor and put all their focus on the Utility segment. For Sense to stop selling the Home monitor entirely makes zero sense unless they want to (slowly) get rid of us and looking for an easier acquisition. For now we remain useful to Sense as beta testers.
I did a little looking into deployment of Sense-enabled meters, which is admittedly different than the number of people running the app on their meters in conjunction with their utilities - my count for 2025 comes to something just over 8M.
“Revelo’s unique features support a variety of next generation AMI use cases to assist utilities with flexible grid management, including support for transportation electrification, distributed energy resources and circuit level capacity management. More than 6 million Revelo sensing meters are under contract and being deployed in North America.”
"Itron announced that its customer, U.S. electric and natural gas company Xcel Energy, has deployed 2 million Gen5 Riva distributed intelligence (DI)-enabled electric smart meters.
@obscuredtrip, from what I can tell, trimming just a little peak usage is a huge win for everyone in the US.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91427779/america-has-plenty-of-electricity-so-why-is-your-bill-skyrocketing-electricity-ai-electric-bills
Only National Grid and Tipmont are listed.
National Grid serves about 20m customers in NY & MA. Only 2.4m are getting smart meters. They are expected to complete the NY rollout in late 2027.
Tipmont serves about 30k in Indiana. They started rolling them out in 2024, expected completion of rollout in late 2026.
It does seem odd that they would put all their eggs in one basket without some motive. They already have the infrastructure for making, selling, and servicing Home Monitors, so saving money is not a likely explanation for discontinuing it. The timing of this change, before anyone can even use Sense from their integrated smart meter, makes me wonder what’s going on.
To your point @obscuredtrip - the utility-facing side of Sense. Notice any connection between the most recent features (EV, solar, and heat pump detection without additional CTs) and the utility features described here ?
Being made possible by Sense’s ‘partnership’ with Enode.
I imagine Sense is working hard trying to figure out how to incorporate Enode’s API on the backend.
Integration vs as part of ML. Either way it’s gunna be quite the task, but if successful it would drastically improve Sense’s device ‘detection’ if that’s the route Sense is going. With Enode’s existing ability to ‘communicate’ and ‘control’ half a million ‘devices’, seemingly about a 499,990% increase over Sense’s, that’s huge.
That itself could be one of the reasons Sense is abandoning home monitors. Keeping us around as alpha testers before beta testing with the utility segment.
I haven’t dug into Enode as API stuff is a bit over my head. @kevin1 not sure if you have looked or dug into www.enode.com, but you would be able to make a lot more sense of everything than I could.
I’m guessing that the monitors are more than an alpha - they also supply training data / ground truth for refinements in detection algorithms that will be increasingly focused on “single CT pair” meters. You really can’t do the solar detection with a meter without have a substantial dataset of solar waveforms across many types of inverters.
Based on the new recent Sense detection stuff that seems very much targeted to make meters a more complete product (EVs, Heat Pumps, and Solar), and a look at the Enode AP endpoints, it looks like Enode stuff is pretty much targeted ar the “Shape” part of the the video - shaping the loads on the grid. Kind of goes back to this:
What’s broken is the system around us. As Chris Wright, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, recently said, “we don’t need more electrons … We only need more electrons a few hours a year at peak demand. We have slack capacity 98% of the time.” Outdated pricing rules hide the real cost of peak demand, shift the burden onto ordinary people, and drive bills higher even when supply is abundant. And as AI’s appetite for energy grows, that broken system is turning into a massive, invisible subsidy — one that lands squarely on consumers.
Agree. When I said Alpha I meant more along the lines of the home monitors testing what’s possible before something tested and rolled out with utility monitors. I imagine there is a lot less less room for ‘error’ and more hoops to jump through when it comes to testing implementation on utility monitors, especially if (when) utilities use this info to monitor/control the grid along with dynamic pricing.
How does this compare in terms of compatibility with Sense? Do you see this data being able to be used as part of Sense’s ML process or more along the lines of an integration? Seems like Enode has a ton of pretty accurate data especially where Sense has sorely lacked, just wondering how Sense will (could) fit it all in.
Going off topic, seams like a lot of states, especially NY is totally focused on ‘green’ energy’ solar, wind, etc… Most of our bills fee’s, surcharges, taxes are tied directly to support that. Along with a good chunk of our ‘delivery’ costs. The cost of the actual energy we use ‘usage cost’ isn’t the problem, it’s everything else. Very little is being done (or funded) to reduce usage, while everything is being done to increase the load on the grid with ‘electrification of everything’ regulations. Sure there are discounts on led lightbulbs and some low income weatherization programs that require HP heat, water, dryers, etc…
It’s as if their line of thought is by pushing agendas and allowing rates to go up, people will be forced to reduce their usage (demand on the grid). This is where Sense is helpful… But we all know taxes & fees never go away much less down.
Small business owners could shut off their main breaker and still have a $2,000 month bill as a commercial customer. There is no incentive to reduce actual usage as the little money they do have is much better spent elsewhere in the business than energy conservation efforts or products.
I think we are at the breaking point of people giving up. As it’s not worth taking the few drastic steps left to reduce usage as usage plays such a little role in the overall bill. Even the most conscientious people are starting to turn against the ‘green’ effort due to these poorly hidden costs.
Trying to make the claim that people are paying 3x higher electric bills 360 days a year because their usage 5 days a year is too much doesn’t go over well….
It might be both for Enode. The API endpoints can both collect data - power data and charge rates, as well as controlling and shaving usage.
I don’t know about NY, but in CA, transmission and distribution costs are charged on per usage basis, so dialing back usage and/or time shifting to off-peak/partial-peak drops all three in sync, so this really wouldn’t be true:
My take is that NY and CA, and a few others are overeager with the “get rid of fossil fueled stuff” initiatives, but I also think that China is rapidly changing both renewable energy, battery and EV economics, in a way that is going to force change here regardless of what we do. The short version is that they are going to make all three of those so cheaply that fossil fuels become the bad economic choice globally. We can tariff short term to keep the implications off our shores, but long-term, the market for our fossil fuel-centric products are going to dry up, and the rest of world is going to become more and more fossil fuel independent.
