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California County Bans SmartMeter Installations
kiwimate writes "Marin County in California has passed an ordinance (PDF) banning the installation of smart meters in unincorporated Marin. Among the reasons given are privacy concerns associated with measuring energy usage data moment by moment and the potential for adverse impact on emergency communication systems used by first responders and amateur radio operators. The ordinance also comments that 'the SmartMeters program ... could well actually increase total electricity consumption and therefore the carbon footprint,' citing 'some engineers and energy conservation experts.'"
The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters."
Could be the real reason for those privacy concerns, and more power to them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
they want the energy to be used, (they want $$$) they just want us to think they want us to use less
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters." Reminds of "My neighbors wifi gives me migraines..."
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters."
I wonder how many in the Marin County government also don't carry cellular phones (often near their hips or groins), or use wifi, or bluetooth.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Could set up a solution so that the data is sent over the power lines instead of being wireless?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What people need is a broadcast of the current energy price, so they can optimize their usage. Reporting peoples usage habits has NO value to either the customer or overall energy consumption. The power company is not going to control the customer usage (except with interruptabe servive).
could well actually increase total electricity consumption and therefore the carbon footprint
What about the carbon footprint of all the vehicles used daily by meter readers? How can a lower power transmission come close to that?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I would be surprised if utility workers unions did not have some input here, meter readers being automated out of a job. I'm not being paranoid, I grew up in such a union household. Although my dad would have been the guy installing/replacing a meter not reading it.
a legitimate concern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter
I'm not claiming this wiki article is complete, but the amateur HF bands are far far away from 900Mhz. I could understand a complaint if the switching supply in the meters (that drives the embedded logic) spewed harmonic RFI and/or dumped noise on the line due to a bad (cheap) design. I think electronic dimmers, radio driven electric fences, and existing broadband-over-power solutions are much bigger threats to HF bands than the circuits in these things.
...I agree with the reasoning behind it (seems like a lot of handwaving - especially the "wifi is scary and will kill your children while you sleep" bit) but frankly I'm glad. In my experience Smart Meters are little more than a money grab by the utility/landlord and have a negligible effect on actual consumption. When I was renting an apartment a few years ago they offered to install one in my apartment. "Stop paying for your neighbors electricity and pay for your own" they told me. Although I wasn't actually paying for the electricity (utilities were covered as part of the rent) I decided to go to their little information session. They spent an hour and a half extolling the virtues of the smart meters few of which were actually virtuous at all. Of course they neglected to mention the fact that there was no concievable way for most of the residents to greatly impact their power consumption. Laundry was in the basement as was the hot water heater and the major power sucking appliances (heat, A/C, fridge and stove) were all building own and not replaceable. Sure, I could save a bit by turning down the A/C or the heat (except for the fact that my A/C at the very least couldn't even be set to lower the room to room temperature) but what really would've saved me money was not forcing the air exchanged by the unit outside to heat/cool the bedroom. Or insulating the windows and doors better (when the wind was a certain way the apartment could be very drafty). But did they offer any of this?
Nope. They offered a small rebate on my monthly rent. Which was less than the average of the sample bills they showed me from other buildings the company owned (when I pointed this out to them they eagerly pointed out the lone bill that was less than the discount they were offering).
Sorry - you want me to save electricity? Come up with a better way than nickle and diming me for everything. Entice me by making some of the more radical home adjustments afforable (solar panels are out - not enough sun in this neck of the woods - but I think a nice little wind turbine on my roof might do well). But don't put lipstick on a pig and expect me to kiss it.
Marin crosses the line in legislating psuedo-science into an active ordinance. I hear the anti_smart-meter people present their case on KBOO (www.kboo.fm) radio, the world-class alternative radio station out of southeast Portland Oregon USA. They're well-intentioned and enthusiastic, but they really seem a little touched with the ol'hippy paranoia 'all science is evil' herb-induced vibe.
Marin is a strange place. I've visited there many times and it seems normal and well-ordered, but it has a true bizarre historical undercurrent that goes back a hundred years (even before all the rich hippies moved there in the 1970s). It's =almost= the kind of place that would pass a law forcing the sun to rise in the West in order to get a great morning sunrise for the folks living in Stinson Beach. It is exactly the kind of place that people would ban a technology that they don't quite understand and doesn't appear to do anything to make them younger and more beautiful and more hip (and more rich). They are exactly the kind of people who would consider a piece of equipment from the power company ('a rather déclassé institution run by drab ordinary pedestrian types, not-our-sort-of-globally-aware-organic-people', dahrling) that emits radio signals from their home-lifespace to be an evil intrusion. If it's not spying on you for the Republicans, then it's trying to keep track of how much electricity is being diverted from your hot tub to the grow lights in your secret garden.
Marin has probably changed a lot since "The Serial" was published in the late 1970s, but it's the kind of place where the people pay a lot of money and a lot of karmic energy to make sure that it doesn't change all that much. Still they have crossed the line on this one issue.
Personally, I'd love to live in Marin. The MILFs are as gorgeous as the models. It's the 'coolest' place on earth. The grass is greener and everything's always groovy, no matter how stupid and ugly the rest of the world becomes. But I'm a little too ugly and a little to poor to be accepted as one of the 'golden cloud people' north of the Golden Gate.
This is really about some people who have seen vastly increased bills. Now, the question is: are the new meters wrong or were the old electromechanical meters (installed decades ago) wrong?
Occam, whare are you? Or, as the saying goes, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This neck of the woods is populated by the 'cult crowd' mentality as far as I see and hear it.
Erhards EST & the 'exclusive gathering' with inside information about XX (be it global warming, vaccinations & autism, or TV and miscarriages) manages to put a scare in darned near everything.
It is almost impossible for me to stop laughing when the newest 'fact' of coming doom is related in Marin.
Problem is, that if I laugh, I loose some good friends.
One. Advertised: if the utility company is having trouble delivering the demanded power, they can reduce the voltage a little bit and buy/generate a little bit less (expensive) peak power. Your lights will burn a little less brightly, but you probably won't notice.Not advertised: if the utility company is having trouble making money or needs a place to sink their spinning reserves during off-peak demand, they can use SG to raise the delivered voltage to end customers. Your lights will burn a little brighter, but you probably won't notice. It will also cost you a little bit more. Too bad.
Two. Advertised: through price signals and load shedding, the utility can reduce the peak-to-trough difference in electricity demand, lowering the cost of delivering electric power and passing the savings on to you. Not advertised: the utility can replace fast-response generators like natural gas with slower response generators like coal, because they don't need as much fast response generation capacity to deal with their now smaller peaks. Of course, coal has a bigger carbon footprint than gas. Too bad.
Yeah, federal law pre-empts, only the FCC gets to regulate wireless devices and their use. I'm pretty sure (IANAL) that this is a case where the power company, if it wishes, can simply ignore the ordinance. And the country is stupid enough to try to enforce fines or sue, crush them in court.
As far as radio interference goes, Wenzel's Techlib has some info about how to mitigate this. Of course, sdddddddddddwsssssssssssssss cvvvvvvvvvvvvvv;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Sorry, cat got on keyboard. Anyway. Of course, it's not like the technicians installing the meters are checking for ground loops... but perhaps they should be? If there is that much potential to interfere with first responders, you'd think some tests on the wiring would be in order...
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Personally, I think "smart meters" are an exceedingly dumb idea.
But your comment is completely ambiguous and content-free, so I cannot discuss it with you.
The information these meters provide would provide consumers with more power to make intelligent choices about their power consumption, likely lowering power usage for many users (those who pay attention to their consumption). In a similar way to how a fuel-efficiency readout helps people make better fuel-efficiency driving decisions, these would have helped provide users make better power-saving decisions. But FUD wins. Bah.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
You're attempting to apply some rational analysis to the problem, when the problem is actually irrational behavior. It doesn't matter that there's a 900 MHz band or where bands are at all. What matters is that a bunch of misled or malicious folks misled other folks into becoming the horde of angry villagers with pitchforks and firebrands chasing something that they don't understand
Bruce Perens.
Touche. I think a small device that monitors your power usage and that the owner can connect to is a great idea. I don't know if smart meters in their current form are a good way to go about it. Why do you feel they are an exceedingly dumb idea?
I don't trust smart meters to give an accurate reading. They're not only electronic, they have wireless (that's probably terribly insecure). It's like electronic voting. How do you verify that they don't just give you a correct reading when you're testing them, but inflate things once in the field? Plus, you can't calculate your instantaneous power usage anymore as you could on the old spinning wheel kind (at least the smart meters here only show total kilowatt hours on the LCD).
Headline should read: California County attempts to put a one year moratorium on installation of SmartMeters, PGE ignores them and installs them anyway.
As for those wondering about the meter reader unions - rumour has it that PGE has already fired all the meter readers and has been using contractors to install the SmartMeters.
The only valid reason I've heard so far is that they use the unlicensed spectrum to communicate back to the home base, which is very close to Marin County's emergency radio system (A trunked system called MERA). but in reality this is nothing more than a political move to mollify all the health-nuts in the valley so the County leaders look they are doing something.
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
This is really about some people who have seen vastly increased bills. Now, the question is: are the new meters wrong or were the old electromechanical meters (installed decades ago) wrong?
Or, there is a third option to consider. A previously approved rate increase went into effect at the same time PG&E started rolling out these meters. So, yes, bills did go up.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
My guess is that there are already products I could install on my own if I wanted to monitor my power consumption. That device doesn't needs serve as a remote-controlled kill switch on my electricity at the same time.
My main objection is from the security angle. The more I learn about data security, the more clear it is just how inevitable it is that complex systems will get pwned. Imagine that if the Stuxnet developers, instead of targeting a few thousand centrifuges in Iran, had decided to target a few hundred million electrical customers in the US and Europe.
This is not a far-fetched, paranoid, or crazy scenario in the least. It's the kind of thing that is simply inevitable unless we can get some more cluefulness and rational discussion going into the decision making process.
This is not just, say, somebody's e-commerce business model we're talking about here. It's the freaking power grid, the #1 thing that day-to-day separates us from being a third-world country. Some things are to big to be allowed to fail.
ZigBee generally operates at 250mW/24dBm max power. Obviously some devices can be made to broadcast higher energy levels, but a quarter watt tends to be used.
I suppose a citation would be nice, but if you google it, you will find most chipsets have that as their maximum power rating. (And as the signal only needs to reach the home, there is no reason for a stronger signal to be used.)
I definitely agree with you there. Should simply be a meter that monitors and records power usage with remote viewing. No remote disconnect or any such.
There are undoubtedly a number of products you can install to do the same thing.
Real people like who, exactly? So far, it's just you and your stories. Not a lot of hard data there.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Same here. Once I got to watch my daily, even hourly, electricity usage, I was able to diagnose some problems. Wait only one day and get results back. I was able to cut my total electricity usage by 40 percent. So either you can use the information to your advantage, or ignore it as yet another nice to have feature. Legislation to make it illegal - morons. I'll scratch Marin of my list of potential places to visit, unless I go on a tour of towns filled with morons.
Real people like who, exactly? So far, it's just you and your stories. Not a lot of hard data there.
To be fair, that's the same amount of evidence you've been presenting..
Pose it this way, does anyone feel neutral about unions? Because I do think that the phrase 'everyone hats unions' is obviously not intended to include those benefiting from unions. Clearly. Therefore, I think the statement is likely something like 'everyone not already pro-union hates unions'. Which really only means they aren't very popular, likely for perceptions that have already been tossed out.
I don't recall what the original comment was, but I will note that the real purpose of smart meters is to allow the utilities to charge more for electricity in times of peak demand, and/or to force some circuits off to reduce demand. They can also (some of them) be used to allow private cogeneration (that windmill on your house) to push electricity back into the grid, so you get paid for it.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
You haven't been looking very hard, have you? Some of the most sensible laws in the country have come out of California, as well as some of the most nonsensical. That's what you get with citizen initiatives.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It sounds like you're mixing up two technologies -- wireless smart meters and power line communication. The two are orthogonal and independent.
Because of the expense, very few smart meter systems use PLC (usually known as Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, in the US). It's expensive to have to bypass all the transformers and other kit in the power grid that wasn't designed to pass communications in the first place, which is fortunate because PLC is nasty to the RF environment -- all those unshielded, long, high, conductors radiate. However, the great majority of smart meter systems with which I am familiar use either licensed channels in the UHF or 800/900 MHz land mobile bands, or use the unlicensed 868/900 or 2400 MHz ISM bands, and they're no more likely to cause interference than any other user of the spectrum.
The marginal cost of peaking power production is several orders of magnitude more expensive than baseline generation capacity so it only makes sense the there should be a disincentive to drive up peak demand. One interesting side effect for warm climate is that solar has peak production right at peak demand period so a pricing model that increases peak cost also incentivises the use of the more sustainable renewable power source.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is the crux of the problem in Smart metering. The last mile problem. The industry does not have standardized protocols or well tested technologies yet for power line communications.
Of the arguments voiced by the good hipp.. citizens of Marin County, the radio interference problem is a legitimate one, that even the power companies themselves struggle with. Its not that it messed up your wibe man but that the data throughput is unpredictable and there is no 'one-fit-for-all' technology that works in all environments, from city center to rural dwelling.
In simple terms, its all about bandwith and transmission theory. You can't expect to push a great amount of data realiably through wires made for electrical mains transmission, certainly not with any kind of high frequencies we are used to with our modern gadgets. The power companies have long used remote control modems at crawling speeds which use the overhead powerlines as transmission medium but those are pretty uniform in characteristics, and you only need to go from one grid node to the next with them. The last-mile end, the consumer end of the utilities are often a huge mess, with old and new wiring, switching and filtering all over the place. A bit like the POTS network was before telcos started tearing out their whole almost-last-mile infra and replacing it with fibers with DSLAMs at the end. The last mile can be anything from a mile to dozens of miles depending on where you are located on the city network. And although it doesn't take many bits of data to send this info down to the power company, you need to multiply that by the number of customers on a simple branch of the network which could be tens of thousands. even more. And every broadcast needs to be isolated from others. Think of collision zones on ethernet except you only have sub MHz bandwidth to work with and a crazy chaotic switching and transmission line characteristics.
Then there is also the very real problem of radio interference. Mains wires weren't designed or installed for carrying any kind of radio frequencies. Consequently it is all too easy to make them into nice ideal broadband antennas that radiate your signal into outer space. Many commercial PLC trials have stumbled upon this problem with local FCC's shutting them down for interfering with electrical appliances, control circuits other commercial radio systems. Furthermore, consumer appliances themselves increasingly interfere with anykind of PLC. Computers and TV's are pretty good sources of nasty radio noise flowing back to the utilities mains, but the worst culprit are all kinds of new compact fluorescent and LED lighting systems that use cheap crappy switching. Some of them are like plugging an electromagnetic countermeasures pod to your mains to make sure no data can get through!
The TFA mentions Hams (Amateur Radio Operators) as one of the opposing gangs and I can tell you that we don't take kindly to being bundled with bloody hippies! We tend to actually know WTF we are talking about! often alerting and advising the FCC and industry on how to best use the limited spectrum we all need to share. Hell, pretty much all the hams I know work for the industrial-complex: IT, telcos, utilities, defence...
73 OH3GPJ
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Just get yourself a nice piece of tinfoil and fashion yourself a nice little hat out of it. It'll keep all that nasty EM radiation away from your precious snowflake brains, and it'll also identify you at a glance for the rest of the world.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
At last! Politicians that have realized they shouldn't permit the installation of electronic equipment that is smarter than they are! :)
but I seriously doubt the county has the ability to regulate the installation of meters, smart or otherwise. It's more properly the domain of the California Public Utilities Commission. Counties have no say in state tariffs. Of course, California IS about the most heavily unionized state, so they will have something to say about it. Just because Silicon Valley is in California, doesn't mean that good technology that could save consumers a lot of money should be deployed there.
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
There are many valid reasons to not like smart-meter tech. However... health concerns? This is the same part of the country that has people who believe that "WiFi makes them sick".
Who'd have thought we'd see the day when Marin County and Kansas would be equally science-hostile... the next question is "are their schools teaching this RF-paranoia, and if so, should a high school diploma from Corte Madera be regarded with the same suspicion that a high school diploma from Kansas, in which 'counting Begats' is considered as valid as radio isotope decay dating?"
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
An electrician once told me that California pretends to be green but in reality they export a lot of energy from out of state. But relating back to the article I think whoever passed that bill needs to wear a tinfoil hat.
I've never had an actual person read our meters.
We have to supply the readings ourselves, and I assume that they then investigate if the readings don't match / are above the norm from your neighbourhood.
Smart meters aren't about meter reading. They're about being able to cut off your energy without having anyone physically visit you. Plus, I guess, a way to provide greater lock-in / revenue growth (i.e. customers must pay for meters, energy company buys them, so they always pay 10x the real price and pocket the difference).
I'm confused - what part of your own electrical consumtion could you possibly need a Smart Meter to understand? Everything I have tells me how much power it uses in the manual, or on the back. I know how many cents per hour it costs me to turn on my 400W plasma TV. I don't care, really, but geek that I am I know.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm sorry, but BULL-SHIT. The poor and middle classes are substantially, if not massively materially richer than 40 or even 20 years ago. Average incomes are much higher, people generally eat better food, have many more material posessions, live longer, etc etc; so much that one of the 'main health problems' today is that 'poor people are too fat'.
Average and median incomes (especially when inflation is taken in affect) have been falling since the 1970s. Check out the Wikipedia article on "Income inequality in the US".
As for living longer, the CDC released a report just a month ago that the US life expectancy actually dropped a little in the last little while.
As for "poor people are too fat", it's because there are more poor. Given that 1/8 of the US population uses food stamps (38M people--more than the population of Canada), it's no wonder, since they have to buy cheap food, which is generally high in calories/chemicals and often leads to Type 2 diabetes (also on the rise). There's an article on FT.com from April 2009 that states that the stamp program hit a record at 32.2M—and flew right past it appears. In the year 2000 there were only 17M on the program, an increase of over 20M, which is more than the population of the Netherlands.
Oh yeah, things have gotten so much better over the last few decades.
and I'm completely sick of the attitude towards technology. Marin is also one of the counties with the highest rate of non-vaccinated children. It's hippie central here.
http://pinopsida.com
And, being a ham operator, I would have noticed by now if the Smart Meter that was installed at my house was causing any interference, and it's not.
Now, the bills every month for 8888 kWh are starting to look a little suspicious....
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
it seems that the political spectrum wraps around on both extreme ends.
http://pinopsida.com
'everyone hats unions'
Damn those unions and their millions upon millions of fashionable hats stolen off the backs of the working man.
I remember when I was working on smart meters back in the late 80s. We installed one on my boss's house to test it and my boss was showing it off to management. We were in the office reading the meter on his house and his usage was high. He picked up the phone, called his wife, and said, "Honey, could you please turn off the air conditioner .... Yes it is .... Honey, I'm reading the meter right now .... Okay." We took another reading about 30 seconds later and the usage had gone back down.
Really smart meters are just a giant scam. Living in Ontario, we've seen our power prices rise ~20% in the last year, and they're already talking about it tripling, and that's before the 'debt retirement charge' that everyone here pays for Ontario Hydro being such a huge fuckup.
Om, nomnomnom...
I'm confused - what part of your own electrical consumtion could you possibly need a Smart Meter to understand?
The usage pattern is important. Your water heater's cycle depends on how much hot water you draw, and how do you know that? Your washing machine may heat water, but do you know how much energy it takes on different settings? It's not documented, and even the manufacturer can't tell you anything beyond the rated power of the heater. But that number is useless, you need to know the duty cycle too.
There are also devices that draw power all the time; more of them today than before. We leave computers running or in sleep mode; but how much power do they draw in those modes? The manual (what manual?) is silent about that. Then there are A/C systems that are controlled by thermostats and RH sensors; nobody can tell how much those fans and compressors and heaters draw until you measure.
There is probably a hundred devices in my home that are always powered (like remotely controllable wall switches, or UPS, or refrigerator, or garage door opener, or the automatic light outside, etc.) I do my best to know their power consumption, but I have a portable Kill-a-watt and I have one Brultech ECM-1240 too. So I don't need to guess.
These meters measure electrical traffic on wires right? and there are available technology for sending data on power wires right? So why would you make them wireless?
I'm glad to be rid of meter readers in my area. I don't need ANY visitors on my property scoping out my stuff.
I don't need new people entering my property when my dogs are out. My property is MINE. Stay the fuck out thanks very much.
I don't need the massive waste of fuel, or the pollution that goes with meter readers driving all over my rural county. That's thousands of gallons of fuel every year, oil changes, antifreeze changes, and a large carbon footprint.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Yeah, when business screws over the private sector workers, they can then redirect the resulting rage against the people who've stood against it, rather than the real culprits. Instead of blaming the corporate class for lining their pockets with all the proceeds of growth, workers suffering under the system will direct their ire against workers who've managed to maintain the pay and conditions that used to be universal. Immigrants are another convenient scapegoat.
The greatest trick the rich every pulled was convincing the poor to fight each other.
Remember hearing all those suppressed studies about CDMA phones linked to brain cancer?
Well, smart meters have about 100x amplitude of a CDMA cell phone.
That's why people are fighting to get them banned in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake counties.
Wikileaks Is Democracy
Ahh, gotcha. I guess I'm just anal about not leaving power-consuming stuff running (I just bought a Roku, and I'm incensed it doesn't have a power switch), and set my thermostat to where the discomfort of the bill and the temperature balance.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hello Bruce:
We exchanged some comments here at /. back in December but I got no reply to the follow up email I sent to you. Please drop me a line at jerry at elizondo-family.net to make sure I got your email address right.
Thanks
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey