One thing that is for sure controversial is when our electric energy meters are proven to be misreading.
At the beggining of 2019, Chilean authorities announced the approval of the roll out of smart meters, and that the meters were going to be charged to the users. This of course caused a lot of stir, and the usual rumors of the meters being innacurate started.
With my usual curiosity, I started to read all what was published about in academic journals, and to my surprise, I found that some brands and models of smartmeters had been found to be faulty, both in measuring more energy consumption and lower than really consumed. Perhaps the most notorious study was performerd by Dr. Leferink from University of Twente, Netherlands.
His work was the main reason that the European Comission through Euramet, started a project in 2018, called MeterEMI, which bears the motto "restoring customer confidence in smart meter readings". This project was funded and is ongoing. The attached publication is one that has been performed with funding of the project and was capable of determining the conditions in which the meters fail with a simple setup of a water pump and a speed controller. The results are impressive. Yet, you can see in the acknowledgments that Euramet is trying to take some distance from the results.
Back in early 2019 when this topic was hot in my country, with a friend that owns a science and technology news website, we contacted Dr. Leferink and he provided us with a very honest appraisal of how his results were received originally, always with reluctance, but finally the evidence was so overwhelming that the issue had to be tackled and the MeterEMI project was born.
