This book provides a novel and holistic perspective on the deployment of prepaid electricity meter technology among energy impoverished (vulnerable) households based in developing or under-developed communities of Sub-Saharan Africa. It explores and reviews the nexus between the technology and socio-economic development, technology acceptance and rejection in low-income households, and ultimately proposes a contextual model to avert or assuage energy poverty in the region using the technology. Science is applied as a convenient, valid, and reliable model to generate bespoke, contextual, and relevant knowledge for policy makers on the development of prepaid meter market in the region. The knowledge shared contributes to extant discourse and debates around the effectiveness of the technology within indigent household settings. The book is intended for energy/electricity utilities, prepaid electricity businesses, policy developers, and other interested parties whose work is related to prepaid electricity meters.

In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics Jason R. Rudy connects formal poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell's electric field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics. Combining formal poetic analysis with cultural history, Jason Rudy traces the development of Victorian physiological poetics from the Romantic poetess tradition through to the works of Alfred Tennyson, the "Spasmodic" poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Algernon Swinburne, among others.

This book focuses on the economics of smart meters and is one of the first to present comprehensive evidence on the impacts, cost-benefits and risks associated with smart metering. Throughout this volume, Jacopo Torriti integrates his findings from institutional cost-benefit analyses and smart metering trials in a range of European countries with key economic and social concepts and policy insights derived from almost ten years of research in this area. He explores the extent to which the benefits of smart meters outweigh the cost, and poses key questions including: which energy savings can be expected from the roll out of smart meters in households? Is Cost-Benefit Analysis an appropriate economic tool for assessing the impacts of smart metering rollouts? Can smart meters play a significant role in research on people’s activities and the timing of energy demand? Torriti concludes by providing a much-needed survey of recent changes and expected future developments in this growing field. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy policy and demand and smart metering infrastructure.

This book describes how equipping buildings with smart meters is essential to improve the prediction of energy costs within smart grids and to help end-users optimize their energy consumption. The book reports on the results of the European Upper Rhine INTERREG project SMI (www.smi.uha.fr), which connects artificial intelligence and micro-societal analysis. It is multidisciplinary and addresses the following aspects: social, legal, environmental, and technical. One of the critical factors for the transition to clean energy is the flexibility of the power grid. A flexible grid requires a constant flow of data about the network and its demand, on the other hand, clients who produce electrical power can be an active part of the demand response if they are informed about the power needs of their appliances. “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” This common management saying also holds true for the area energy efficiency. Without a clear understanding of their energy usage, consumers are unable to take steps to reduce their consumption. A new intelligent tool is presented that is more efficient, safe, and acceptable to consumers. Thus, users of this intelligent tool will be able to collect and predict the consumption of their electrical appliances. At the same time, the consumption information is anonymized before being relayed to the energy supplier. In parallel, new techniques will be evaluated to improve the security level of the smart meter in a highly heterogeneous network.