Welcome to Britain – where energy rationing risks becoming the norm

The really controversial part of smart meters, described by Porter, is charging you more when you most need it. By studying Uber, a pioneer of surge pricing, we get a big clue where the problem really lies.

Uber can’t require that its casual workforce clock-in to work – but it can incentivise them to. When Uber introduces surge pricing, it does so to increase capacity, and make more cars appear where they are most needed. 

Rates go up for drivers, and so those already on the road shift over from one location to another, to try and capture demand. Some even switch off the TV and jump in the car.

On the other hand, the surge pricing envisaged for energy consumers is a one-sided conversation – it’s all stick and no carrot. Consumers are being clobbered for one very simple reason that we don’t have enough energy.

In 2007, the EU announced its energy strategy, devised by a former teacher and Latvian Communist Party member called Andris Piebalgs. He set a target of a 13pc reduction in energy usage across the bloc by 2020. Rather than getting producers to make more, we would all try and use less.

The target came from a deluded belief that because so much heavy industry had left Europe, with correspondingly big falls in CO2 emissions, the rest would be easy too. In fact, reducing energy merely punishes the consumers and industries that are left. The following year Piebalgs admitted that it didn’t really add up:

“A radical change in consumer behaviour is needed if we want Europe to be more energy efficient,” he wrote in 2008.

As I write, we’re importing 25pc of our power, an astonishing amount for a country so blessed with natural resources and know how. We produce only two thirds of the energy we did in 1999. But there will be days to come where no one has any to spare to lend us.

So pursuing energy scarcity is much worse than a botched meter programme. It’s a catastrophic, civilisational-scale error, and all energy companies can do as a result is coerce consumers to use less. We’ve designed a system that suits them, not us.

Anger is quite justifiable, but taking it out on the meters is rather like blaming the poor old waiters for your appalling meal; they aren’t the ones who failed to order the ingredients, or cook them properly. Blaming the devices just lets the guilty off the hook. If we had an abundance of energy, nobody would mind the meters.