The promise was to help you control your electricity bill by becoming more aware of your energy use. The downside is that with the data gathered, other people and businesses can also become more aware of your habits, like when you go to work, go on vacation, etc. Is the potential energy savings worth the invasion of privacy trade-off? I sure don’t think so. I really don’t want PG&E or anyone else for that matter knowing how I live my life inside my own home.
To add insult to injury, the Public Utility Commission just granted PG&E a rate hike to pay for lost profits due to these devices that no consumers asked for. In my own conversion experience, PG&E basically said “our way or the highway” – I didn’t have a choice. Now I have a ZigBee WiFi capable datalogger on the side of my house, tracking my family’s habits. Now the EFF is getting involved for privacy protection. Fortunately, the PUC has now ordered PG&E to provide an opt-out plan. With privacy issues rising, there may be more takers now.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
California Proposes Strong Privacy Protections for “Smart Meters”
The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has released a proposal for strong privacy protections for “smart meter” data, closely following the recommendations from EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology. If adopted and finalized, the plan could become a model for how to protect sensitive consumer information while providing new ways to save energy.
California’s PG&E is currently in the process of installing “smart meters” that will collect detailed data of energy use —750 to 3000 data points per month per household—for every energy customer in the state. These meters are aimed at helping consumers monitor and control their energy usage, but the information that is collected can reveal much more about a household’s daily activities: when people wake up, when they come home, when they go on vacation, and maybe even when they take a hot bath.
Many third parties will want access to this sensitive information, and the California PUC has recommended strong protections for the transfer of the data to others. This should help prevent the data’s misuse, hopefully blocking new intrusions into our home and private life. We hope the California PUC goes on to adopt its proposal, creating a blueprint for energy data and privacy protection that can be used across the country.
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I don’t think smart meters will ever “save” energy. I mean, what are they going to do? It isn’t as if they can turn off the power on your home, and to get the information into the home would be expensive. And there are no plans I’m aware of to do it for PG&E.
Smart meters simply eliminate the need for people to read the meters. Also, they will allow companies like PG&E to have better metrics, which the PUC uses to determine how well the utility delivers power. They will do this by increasing response time to loss of grid and reroute power faster. This will keep the fines lower for PG&E.
Consumer benefits? I can’t think of any.
Let’s not forget this is the same PG & E that spent $25 million to $40 million attempting to pass a referendum which would effectively enshrine themselves permanently as the utility providers to all existing municipal customers.
http://exiledonline.com/how-pge-plans-to-screw-the-golden-state-by-enshrining-its-corporate-energy-monopoly-in-the-california-constitution/
The same utility which has been unable to come up with documentation covering the natural gas pipeline explosion – which appears to have been caused by ‘stress testing’.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-09/news/27018626_1_san-bruno-line-pg-e-pacific-gas
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-02-13/news/28532469_1_pipeline-pg-e-president-chris-johns-pacific-gas
Let’s not forget PG & E is also the beneficiary of decades of public spending which built the dozens of dams which make PG & E so ‘green’.
PG & E is also at the warmist forefront in providing support and its name behind all sorts of AGW political organizations.
Sorry, I have family and friends in “Caulifornia”, and I love to visit it. But birds of a feather and all. Until you guys are willing to stop electing idiots like Moonbeam Brown, there is no hope for you.
So … you think an E-field only shield is going to make that much difference?
.
Zeke Hausfather says:
Just 4 hours later, at midnight, it costs me $0.04 cents to buy the same kwh. Without smart meters, I can only charge the customer a fixed rate
Time of day metering was trialed in various places more then 20 years ago.
Sorry…the government has been quietly inserting all kinds of clever devices into our home environments(for our own good). I have digital cable…and my cable box has been ‘locked’ onto the Emergency Alert System more then once.
First will be the smart meters, then will come the smart appliances.
The “Smart” meters/grid will not solve any problems. The reason it won’t is because it adds a significant level of complexity to an already complex system. Complexity leads to chaos (of the mathematical variety as well as the social variety), and failure.
Brian D Finch says:
May 12, 2011 at 5:24 am
…useful information for burglars too.
============
Used to be they’d just case the joint, first. Now they can pay someone to download the info from the central repository and translate it into something the burglar understands.
Can’t imagine PG&E skimping on security measures for this data.
/sarc-off
I have direct experience in “Smart meters” as an executive in a competive electricity market. There are smart meters and then there are smart meters. All of them are actually quite dumb! By way of back ground, reading meters has been a challenge in the electricity industry for a long time. The general mode has been people walking from door to door. It may or may not surprise you that this is a relatively dangerous occupation, trips, falls, car accidents and dog attacks are quire common. The economics of this are a function of density, dense cities good, rural areas bad.
A company can always elect to read less frequently, but then faces either billing less frequently (working capital effect) of billing on estimated data (customer dis-satisfaction effect).
Many different systems have been trialled, drive by radio, power line carrier etc. Replacement cost has also been an issue with a standard disc meter or single register digital meter being very cheap and a full time of use smart meter being relatively expensive. However, like most things volume production matters. A number of regulators around the world decided that all their respective customers should have smart meters. Once someone starts to order millions the price falls and they become economic to the next group etc.
Not all meters have remote disconnect built in. This is a very expensive feature and has safety implications. You think something is not working, play with the wires, the circuit gets remotely reconnected and ……zap!
The primary drivers range from cost reduction, no meter readers, improved data accurracy, to fantasies about all customers wanting to pay spot prices (have you ever seen the non-normal distribution of spot prices? They are bounded by zero on one end and sometimes nothing on the other!) and regulators who know what is best for everyone.
There are many products where the underlying commodity or key input varies through time, seasonally or based on demand etc. Not all of these mean that as consumers we face constant changing prices (petrol and interest rates being a few that vary on very short time frames as do seasonal vegetables).
Information matters. Signalling prices can be just as important as making people pay prices. You will not like time of use prices when you get them! Even with interest rates we get the opportunity to hedge the underlying changes in the variable rate, by taking 1,2,10 or 30 year mortgage rates. Offering mulit-year fixed prices is becoming common in the market where I am based.
To date appliance manufacturers have shown little interest in interfacing to electricity price signals, why? Hardly any customers know it could be possible and even less want it!
Many meters are using wireless transmission, cellular etc. This is because communications access has in the past been a problem. Anyone noticed where most of their communications goes, yes the internet. Eventually these meters will talk directly into an internet connection.
And for the person who suggested covering them in foil, well the systems tell us when a meter has not responded for awhile, so we send someone to check. Most of us in the electricty sector are pretty slow, but even we can work out that type of caper!
DJ said “This ranks with putting a GPS device on your car that not only logs how many miles you drive, how fast you drive each of those miles, but upon which road you travel upon…”
I already had a call from our insurance company asking if I wanted to be part of a trail group for these auto GPS trackers. They said since I had a new teenage driver, it would be a useful thing for me to check where he is or how fast he is going.
Big brother is so almost completely here…
Here’s a website dedicated to stopping smart meters:
http://stopsmartmeters.org/
If you want to know the truth behind those smart meters read this
BC Hydro ‘Smart Meters’ Not so Smart.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/32635
The idea that smart meters are not an invasion of privacy is exceedingly naive. Some of the items that can be entered in evidence in a court of law in the USA include your credit card records, your phone records, your internet records and just about anything for which there is not a law creating an exception. So, your power use records will be admissible in court.
The idea that your power use records cannot be read to discover your habits is mind boggling on a blog such as this one. There will be forensics experts and thieves who can eyeball your records and discover the signature for your computer. So, your computer use will become admissible in court.
This is a huge invasion of privacy and if it does not offend you, especially Americans, then I can only suspect that you have some motive for surrendering your freedom. What is it? Are you a watermelon?
Ron Dean writes: “So what is “control” of an individual Smart Energy appliance? Well, as you can expect, part of that control is allowing the utility to turn on/off non-critical appliances during a peak power consumption events. If the utility has run out of reserve power, and has to resort to rolling black outs, an alternative is offered by Smart Energy appliances. This could allow the utility to turn off the pool pump, the electric dryer, the air-conditioner, and other non-critical appliances as opposed to whole-sale neighborhood blackouts. ”
Sorry but you just sound like BC Hydro marketers…
It “could” lower your bill… reminds me of the “may”, “could” we find so often in the alarmist climate literature…
Who is to decide what is non critical appliance? Tell me when I decide to enjoy a great music listening session using my 2x1000w amp power to lift Mahler to a new height, this will be an essential part of my freedom to do as I wish in my home, when I feel like it. It may be deemed not essential for some Ontario Hydro bureaucrat but for me it is as essential as food.
Blackouts are the results of utilities limited investments in providing safe, reliable power. To suggest that they should become part of our life unless we all play “greeny does debby” is simply advocating second rate service, thought control.
Anyone concerned about how Big Green is turning the screw on us can read this site
http://www.smartgridnews.com/index.html
where all the “good” news for them is reported…
Its know that elevated summer temperatures kill people (particularly old people).
So when the smart meter turns off your A/C and your cant turn it back on, and someone dies, just what are the power companies going to say in the resultant court case…??
http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Technologies_DG_Renewables/Yikes-80-renewables-Smart-grid-stress-test-ahead-3664.html
“The news that a UN-commissioned report says renewable energy could provide almost 80% of the world’s energy by 2050 may have advocates beaming with joy. While that number comes from the most optimistic scenarios in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released Monday, it indicates that renewable energy sources could grow faster (and sooner) than expected.
The IPCC panel reviewed 164 scenarios involving six sources of renewable energy: bioenergy, direct solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind. More than half of the scenarios reviewed put the renewable energy yield at more than 27% by 2050 – that’s still a fairly big number.
The report, a 25-page distillation of the original 1,000-page assessment, adds that the R&D needed for significant increases in renewable energy is most effective when supported by deployment policies that “simultaneously enhance demand for new technologies.”
A Business Green article quoted Prof. Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC working group that produced the original assessment, as saying the “…substantial increase of renewables is technically and politically very challenging.” But the report also notes that, even in the absence of those policies, renewables will continue to grow. ”
This shows Big Green and IPCC working hand in hand. The science does not matter anymore, they are doing it through the backdoor.
Here is where it all starts: IPCC
http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/docs/ipcc33/SRREN_FD_SPM_final.pdf
Suppress the link GHG climate change and all this carefully crafted plot fails… except the green capitalists would have too much to lose. GE can pretend going back to fundamentals, they still left a legacy of smart meters/grid to be sold…
One word about Zeke Hausfather’s dream of varying rates for the customer – here in Germany, the ratepayer tariff is 2/3 taxes and 1/3 the cost of the electricity. So, if that third varies it means nearly nothing. They take taxes per kWh, not by multiplying the cost by a facotr (with the exception of VAT).
Here, smart meters are also advertised as a future cost saving measure for the custgomer – but given the tax structure, you can save only very little. Think the politicians will change the tax structure? Not in this universe… Smart meters are advertised to the gullible.
Well it is more about them increasing their profits at your expense. At the moment, they periodically read your meter, and subtract last month’s numbers to get your total monthly usage. With a smart meter, they know exactly when you are using power, and when you aren’t, and their smart meters, will tell them when most people want to use power, so they will jack up the rate for that period of time, and when everybody is asleeep in a darkened houe with not an electron in motion, they will drop the price.
They wanted to give me $50 of their customer’s money, to let them put a smart control on my air conditioner, so they can turn it on and off, whenever they want to. So I told them thanks but no thanks. In the seven years I have lived in this house, the air conditioner, has NEVER been turned on; even to test to see if it works. So I don’t want pg@e turning it on and costing me money.
Now I’m a capitalist, so I believe in free enterprise; but they are a State regulated absolute power monopoly, and all residentials should pay the same electricity rate.
Now some companies opt for a brown-out rate, that lets pg@e turn them down if usage is very high, and the system is in danger of overload. The companies weigh the risk of that brown out, against a significantly lower rate, for volunteering.
If you are growing single crystal silicon or even more exotic things; you don’t want a brown out discount.
By the way, it was just reported earlier thois week that Cree Research (major LED technology biggie) recently set a new white LED efficacy record (Lumens per Watt (electrical)). Typical commercial LED lamps can do about 55 l/W, under real operational conditions. The Cree result was a pulsed room temperature R&D lab result. So they didn’t allow the LED to Temperature stabilize like a production lamp would.
231 lumens per Watt at 350 mA DC (pulsed) At the forward Voltage of InGaN blue LEDs, that is about one Watt electrical.
It was about a 4500 K cold white. My guess is a warmer 2700-3500 range white would be less, but 4500 would be ok for some applications.
Of course this is a research result; it is likely to be a while before they break 100l/W for a commercial production white LED.
But I’m impressed. Also this was a single die LED, and therefore some blue die/phosphor configuration. Very nice work Cree.
“”””” Neil says:
May 12, 2011 at 12:50 pm
I have direct experience in “Smart meters” as an executive in a competive electricity market. There are smart meters and then there are smart meters. All of them are actually quite dumb! By way of back ground, reading meters has been a challenge in the electricity industry for a long time. The general mode has been people walking from door to door. It may or may not surprise you that this is a relatively dangerous occupation, trips, falls, car accidents and dog attacks are quire common. The economics of this are a function of density, dense cities good, rural areas bad. “””””
Neil, it’s nice to have someone in the industry speak up.
And by the way, I owe you a beer, the first time somebody reports that their power bill went down because of their smart meter, leading to the power company requesting the PUC to let them lower their electricity rates, because of all the meter readers they laid off.
And as near as I can remember, I have lived in houses supplied with connect to the grid electricity, for well over 70 years; not quite back to Tesla, and Edison, but almost, and somehow, the power company never ever was unable to read the meter to bill us.
I would ask your technical experts, why they are unable to read people’s meters like all the other power companies can.
Why they couldn’t read a meter would vary any there are many possible reasons. My father was a meter reader for Wisconsin Electric, so I have some knowledge of this. Additionally at my current home, I have some direct experience with a meter they can’t read (gas, not electric though). One reason might be meter location, some homes especially larger multi-residence bulings and some older homes have the meters located inside the building. If no one is home when the meter reader comes around, they can’t read the meter at that location. When this happens rather than not billing the meter, they apply an estimated reading based on past usage. If a location goes long enough without an actual reading, they send a notice that you have to make an appointment to get an actual reading. With my gas meter, I used to have this issue. The meter is inside in the basement and I am never home during normal readings. The next bill after the scheduled actual reading can include large adjustements from prior bills.
Another reason they might not be able to read a meter is dogs loose in the yard where the meter is located for an exterior meter. The meter readers are trained to not attempt to read these unless someone is home to restrain the dog. They don’t know which dogs are dangerous and which aren’t.
I have no skin in this game, and as I said above, I’m not saying the smart meters are good or bad. However, your statements above are a bit silly.
I read the http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/32635 article objecting to smart meters, and I find their arguments lacking. The problems PG&E had with their installations is valid. But arguing that the old technology worked fine thus nothing should be changed, is ludicrous. Using that argument, you should be using a computer build in 1985 with a 100bps modem hooked up to it. Maybe a punched paper tape for external storage. That technology was solid, and worked well – so why did you change it? By the way, put away your GPS and pull out the Loran – and make sure you drive a car made pre 1985- because you should not take advantage of electronic controls in modern vehicles. The old technology worked after all, so why change it?
Second, you raise a classical “red herring” logical fallacy in comparing my statement to “alarmist climate literature”. One has nothing to do with the other in this conversation – however, I’ll address both your inference and the red herring itself.
“could” lower your utility bill because I have no control over what the utilities do. I’m not a soothsayer to predict the future, and neither do I really trust the utilities. So “could” is the proper term, meaning: it has the ability to lower costs, but other realities may occur to keep it from happening.
Now your red herring. I want to comment on this because I find it one of my pet annoyances in reading the comments here. The use of probabilistic words (e.g., “may”, “could”) in scientific literature is by design. You show me a paper that states “does” and “is” in proving a scientific theory, and I’ll show you a paper you cannot trust.
The scientific process, by design, cannot prove a theory. However, there is always the possibility it can be disproven. Theories that have never been disproven after a time become accepted. But that does not prove the theory, and the probabilistic words *still* apply.
Objecting to any paper merely because of the use of words such as “may” and “could” makes the objector sound ignorant of the scientific process. There are many reasons to object to pro AGW papers, but those words are not amongst them.
That’s fine. But when the blackouts come, you not only lose your amp, but your lights, refrigerator, perhaps HVAC and the like. Your argument is an all-or-nothing deal. I find that a bit unreasonable.
I agree with your comments regarding blackouts and limited investments. Personally, I think it silly to invest $700,000,000 in a new generator to assure the 4 or 5 times a year the utility cannot meet peak demand is taken care of; especially if there is a better way to make those assurances at less cost. It makes sense to attempt to average the demand out and avoid that huge investment. But if you want to pay your share of that $700,000,000 so that those 4 or 5 times a year you can blast your amp without interruption, then more power to ya’.
Your conclusion that smart meters are “simply advocating second rate service, thought control” is of dubious logic, and does not follow from what has been stated. But, believe that if you wish.
To block smart meter data collection, just put a 50Hz notch filter ( also called a “Noise Filter” ) between the smart meter and the utility supply. That way as the smart meters uses frequencies other than 50Hz electricty supply frequency to communicate with the metering people at the untility comapny, then the nose filter will stop commands to and from the meter – no snooping! Probably make the energy comapny cranky too, but hey, they will jsut have to get off their arses and send a human to read the meter…oh the humanity!!
Or, if they stop you putting in a noise filter, you could install something that will interfere with the command frequencies by drowing the frequencies out ( effectively using a jammer ). However, this may also interfere with other houses too and I suspect the utility nazis will probably jump on you pretty quickly.
You could install a notch filter/noise filter betyween the meter and the house – that way they cant turn appliances on and off as required in future.
Alternatively, install photovoltaic cells on the roof and have a chunk of the hosue run off batteries and an inverter – in effect you are energy self sufficient ( oh I love that idea….) and so you dont need none of their stinkin electricity no how….
Actually, last idea makes more sense to me. You could isolate the metered part of the house from the rest, and it doesnt matter how much they tell your meter to turn stuff off etc, it wont have any impact. Its like telling the untility “we dont need you now ….bye….” …no bills, no snooping….no control over you.
Actually, the more I read about the concept of coiming energy rationing so it supports the huge lie of global warming, themor eI’m convinced we effectively need to declare energy independance by using solar cells to generate our own.
Then we wont give 2 figs what happens, the govt can switch power on and off as much as they wont, we wont care. Maybe we could even physically disconnect from the grid…..
I think the data is valuable to the power companies for the planning and running of the grid, however its only valuable in agreggated forms. There is no value to them for knowing an individual’s power use (apart from their marketting of course, but thats a different kind of “value” that isn’t “necessary”) and so I think the data should be immediately aggregated to substation level and then deleted.
I am looking forward to my smart meter. It is on my house now but the paperwork said it will be months before I can go online to get reports. I have a large bill. About $300 per month. My neighbors all have bills from $80-$175 or so. My wife thinks it is the greatest injustice to have to turn out the lights. Even when nobody is home. I want to be able to get something to show her what that costs. My bill was actually lower the first month. Not sure why but I imagine it had to due with lost data from riping out the old meter without recording things. I am sure my wife will just say, bill more and spend less time reading “Watts Up With That.”