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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
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.
Could set up a solution so that the data is sent over the power lines instead of being wireless?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If by "they" you mean the energy corporations, you're right. County officials being among the easiest of all government officials to bribe, and usually the least expensive, I can't imagine that the 2010 version of Enron would miss such an opportunity.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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!
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.
They already installed mine back when I was unable to decline for any reason. My concerns are the documented inaccuracies, signal interference with wifi, security (anyone with a bit of electronics know how can read your meter) and general pointlessness (since they still have to read the meters by hand to bill you).
Not the ones around here. They can remotely read them from quite a distance away. They still have to drive around. But there's less driving, less stop and go, and no reading by hand.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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?"