What's Wrong with the Wireless Smart Meter

Quote: The reason for smart meters is to sell smart meters, and then smart appliances.

An excerpt from Joyce Nelson’s upcoming article, “High Voltage: Spin and Lies of a Global Energy Grid,” in the upcoming September/October Watershed Sentinel

 “The truth is that smart meters aren’t exactly necessary for a smart grid,” stated Forbes (Feb. 1, 2011), “but for technical and economic reasons, they’re here to stay.”  

 Just what those technical and economic reasons are,even business consultants have been hard-pressed to explain – especially because eliminating thousands of human meter-reader jobs during a recession doesn’t play well. “The business case for rolling out expensive smart meter networks is often thin,” noted a March 2011 report from global research/consulting firm Ovum, so utilities need to “investigate alternative revenue generation opportunities from their smart meter infrastructure.” 

Highlights:

  • One of those “opportunities” is data sales. As The Guardian’s John Vidal explains (March 30, 2011), through smart meters, “power companies will be able to tell everyone’s energy-use habits precisely, to the point of knowing which appliances they use, when people are in or out of a house, how efficient their boilers are and what they cook. This data is commercially valuable and it can be expected that it would be sold to other companies.”
  • BC Hydro claims that spending $1 billion on smart meters in the province will save $732 million in electricity theft from 2006 to 2033 but this figure is subject to a multitude of qualms and qualifications. See Stephen Hume’s article, Numbers on electricity theft by pot growers don’t add up
  • The key reason for smart meters is huge profits for the information and communications technologies sector – IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Oracle, Itron, etc. In other words, the reason for smart meters is to sell smart meters, and then smart appliances.
  • Within the appliance manufacturing industry, the “smart appliance” sector is currently in fierce competition with the “energy efficient” appliance makers for sector dominance – much like the competition between Betamax and VHS back in the 1980s. While energy-efficient appliances don’t need the smart meter (or a smart grid) to function, smart appliances do.
  • Making the smart meter mandatory is a crucial step in determining who wins the competing system protocols, and an obvious boost for smart-appliance makers like General Electric.
  • BC Hydro has awarded the first smart meter contract to Corix Utilities. One of the two owners of Corix is CAI Capital Management, whose senior advisor is David Emerson – Executive Chair of the BC Transmission Corp, Chair of the BC Premier’s Economic Advisory Council, Chair of the Alberta Premier’s Council for Economic Strategy, director of Timberwest Forest Corp., former CEO of Canfor, and current chair of something called EPIC.

The people of the Netherlands raised such an outcry against mandatory smart meters that the government was forced to abandon the policy.

On March 22, 2010, the state government of Victoria, Australia, announced “an indefinite moratorium” on the rollout of smart meters.That moratorium has since been lifted – but the government has just finished (June 21, 2011) consulting citizens about the program and a program review, including finances.               

In California, 43 cities, towns, or counties have gone on record opposing smart meters – and 11 local jurisdictions have banned them completely. You can see the list at http://stopsmartmeters.org/sample-letter-to-local-government/ca-local-governments-on-board/        

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