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Ask Slashdot: Are Smart Meters Safe?
An anonymous reader writes "There is a lot of controversy and a big hullabaloo about Southern California Edison and various other utilities around the country installing smart meters at residential homes. Various action groups claim that these smart meters transmit an unsafe amount of RF and that they are an invasion of privacy. The information out there seems rather spotty and inconsistent — what do you engineers out there think? Are these things potentially harmful? Are they an invasion of privacy?"
In Europe, they're being investigated as a privacy issue:
Hi-tech monitors that track households' energy consumption threaten to become a major privacy issue, according to the European watchdog in charge of protecting personal data.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has warned that smart meters, which must be introduced into every home in the UK within the next seven years, will be used to track much more than energy consumption unless proper safeguards are introduced.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/01/household-energy-trackers-threat-privacy
safe for your privacy and bank account, no.
This headline violates Betteridge's Law, please rephrase so the question is: Are Smart Meters Unsafe?
Seriously, which idiot editor posted this garbage? /glances up
Of course.
I'll be these folks lodged some of their complaints over a mobile phone. And none of them use garage door openers, or keep track of their kids at the mall using FRS radios... argh. If they don't like the idea of remote meter reading, fine-- that's one thing, and a valid discussion to be had. But unsafe RF levels ? Are you KIDDING me ?
- Marching Band: It's not just for breakfast anymore
Not only is there no evidence that these meters are harmful, but the effect of radio frequency exposure upon living tissue (approximatly none) is well-studied and understood. These radiophobes have about as much scientific respectability as the anti-vaxers, homeopaths and creationists. They are a parody of science.
Can you editors please present the article submitted with a decent summary and leave off the inflammatory questions tagged onto the end? This trend has been getting worse as time goes on...and the answer to these questions is usually the same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
Yes.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
> Are these things potentially harmful?
They are every bit as dangerous as cellphones.
> Are they an invasion of privacy?
Of course. They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using. What business is that of theirs?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... I wouldn't want a remote-controllable power switch to be available to 3rd parties, authorities and who knows who else. Electricity is vital and this is just another vulnerability someone might exploit or use to control / blackmail me.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
A lot of the RF meters also have the capability of being shut off from remote. Having a wardriver see your electricity usage is one thing. Having someone be able to shut off electricity to people on a Friday before finals is something completely different.
Our water meter was just replaced with a digital one that transmits to the Powers That Be. I thought it was pretty cool. The display has a photo sensor so it only comes on when you shine a flashlight on it (it's in the basement). Our reported monthly water usage is also lower since we got the new meter... I can only assume it's more accurate.
Under CISPA, if it passes the Senate, the government can see any private corporate record it desires. Including your smartmeter electrical usage.
Even without CISPA, governments or govt-controlled utilities at the state level have passed laws mandating rolling blackouts. So your A/C could suddenly shutoff and you'd get nice and toasty. (I prefer dumb meters that *I* control without any communication back to the central entity.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
having worked on some of those meters a good chunk use 900mhz RF.
Serious question: If you wrap your smart meter in tinfoil (or for purposes of this argument) lead, what happens?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I remember reading one news story where a property owner was saying he considered anyone coming onto his property to be a violation of his rights and might shoot someone from the power company if they tried to install a smart meter. I wish I could have asked him how the power company reads his meter right now?
Stupidest person ever.
At least one of the major brands of Smart Meter use Zigbee radios. Hardly what I'd consider unsafe.
I have a really awesome aluminum hat that protects me from the meters as well as other government mind control efforts. Everyone should have one.
http://zapatopi.net/afdb/
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
The FBI released a report on "smart meters" and how customers are exploiting them. http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/04/fbi-smart-meter-hacks-likely-to-spread/
Privacy concern maybe, but anything else is up there with healing crystals and WiFi migraines on the quackery scale.
Given the amount of TV signals, cell phone signals, microwave Telecom signals, police, fire, ambulance, taxi radios, the cummulatinve radiation of millions of electronic goods, the RF from the power lines themselves, is the addition of a smart meter really going to make a difference? Or is this just a cynical way by people who oppose them to get the public to rally against smart meters.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
1. The power company (very likely) already knows your power consumption habits. Lots of meters send automated reads every 15 minutes anyway. This is not new, at all. The processing power and manpower to actually mine this data does not yet exist, and if power companies wanted to put this in the pipeline they'd have to spend bazillions of dollars doing so.
2. The EM radiation emitted by smart meters (especially those in the 900MHz range) is comparable to a cell phone, except for the fact that it's not placed directly against your ear, and it chirps for a few ms every few minutes, as opposed to constantly against your head
The crazies who spout nonsense about cancer and privacy are of the same sort that believe in homeopathy. You will notice that they don't cite their sources, and make generalized, unsupported claims.
They certainly use excessive spectrum; the 900 mhz versions, for example, tend to be spread spectrum, non sampling; they just start blazing up and down the frequency range. Very unpleasant.
Still, not harmful.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
There is a proof of concept showing that the use of smart meters could reveal television usage
OH MY GOD!!
This is an outrage! I mean, it's not as if anyone driving by your house in a properly-equipped van can already know what you're watching by picking up the frequencies emitted by your TV receiver's local oscillator or anything...
Oh, wait a minute...
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Don't forget the biggest source of hazardous radiation: the sun.
> Are they an invasion of privacy?
Of course. They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using. What business is that of theirs?
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
They already have instrumentation at the substations that tells them how much power my neighborhood is using so they know how much power to generate, they don't need to know when I'm doing laundry, when I go to work, when my house is vacant because I'm on vacation, etc.
They are every bit as dangerous as cellphones.
People use them while driving?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
argument as the fear portion of FUD.
The RF is safe. Any controversy about that is manufactured in PR room, or stupid peoples heads.
The privacy "concern" is a policy issue. One that is way overrated.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That link really doesn't demonstrate the answer to the question of "how will they read power consumption down to the device level"? At best someone carries on about home automation, but that's always been a voluntary matter. Reading the meter more often than monthly will reveal finer resolution like trends(i.e. Friday traditionally use more) information a power utility can use to plan upgrades.
The difference between a smart meter and someone reading it manually, is the smart meter has your usage over time, not just X amount of KWh this month.
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand. - Frank Herbert
If by 'safe' you mean doesn't put out a harmful amount of RF, I would guess the jury's out on that one
No, RF is well understood. If it's non-ionizing, it's not harmful.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
. . . if you remove them while they are running.
My neighbor has a big antenna for his hamm obsession. Is that thing emitting a strong signal than my smart meter? Should I fear and then smote his antenna?
I once pulled the off lever on a fuse box at a frat house at 2AM the night before finals. Bunch of assholes.
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
They already have instrumentation at the substations that tells them how much power my neighborhood is using so they know how much power to generate, they don't need to know when I'm doing laundry, when I go to work, when my house is vacant because I'm on vacation, etc.
Yeah, it is obvious the power company in intent on stealing secrets about your laundry habits rather than trying to balance infrastructure cost and capability.
Those sons-a-bitches should quit trying to provide you with better service and let you live in peace. Call and tell them to disconnect you from the grid altogether. Install PV on your roof and keep those nosy power company bastards at bay!
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Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
Problem with California is EVERY THING is unsafe, the should just deem it a waste land cause everything causes cancer in that state
http://team-fox.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mcdonalds-warning-sign.jpg
We're not talking about radioactive fluid (ionizing radiation). We're talking about non-ionizing radio frequency waves. The sun produces more of those than all your electronic equipment combined, and with a shorter (more energetic) wavelength to boot.
Cell phone radio waves are used for carrying voice. This means that they are analog in nature and are therefore sine waves. Now sine waves are by their very nature are curved. This means they are easily able to flow over and around DNA and other molecular structures such as proteins. This is not the case for digital computer or in this case Smart Meter WiFi EM radiation. The data computer WiFi radiation carries is digital in nature and therefore only has two values 1 and 0. This means that it is transmitted as a square wave with a flat instead of a curved leading edge. As a result it is not able to easily flow over and around a cell's DNA but rather slams into it at several hundred thousand times a second. This is like a hammer hitting a string of pearls over and over and over. Eventually the pearls and the string will break.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Or the could call your cable company.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's only one thing in this article that seems like a legitimate concern:: the issue with possible incorrect bills and an issue I didn't really see raised: the possibility of unauthorized access/tinkering.
The lady whose electric bill shot up 300% ... either she was somehow not being billed for the power she used all along, or else the new meter is faulty. THAT is a legitimate concern.
However, I am sick to death of all these whiny whiners and their "I'm allergic to RF" .. NO. No, you're not. You're not special, you don't have some super power that lets you receive radio waves... you're not experiencing something that science or big business is covering up... you're being hypochondriacs or else you''ve got Munchhausen's syndrome. Either way, you sure as hell don't experience RF sensitivity - not unless you're talking about the power levels inside your microwave oven.
rabble, rabble!
The Digital Sorceress
I personally don't see how a smart meter is an invasion of privacy; the power company is the one supplying you with power and should be able to manage their network. If anything the downside to smart meters has been that people who think their environmentally friendly and end up using smart meters, only to find out that their power bill ends up going up, because they're not being as power conscious as they thought they were. This hurts their ego, so they declare an invasion of privacy. Even though I don't think that there are any dangers from the RF aspect of these, why don't the power companies avoid the complaints by using some sort of "broadband over the power line" solution? Ideally they could install another wire to be the communication wire from the reader, to the local hub, but the overhead on that would be tremendous.
So, I used to write server software for one of these companies, and I'd say the biggest concern is the corners they're cutting in order to get a product to market. Having an internet aware electricity grid is a terrible, terrible idea, especially when the leaders of these organizations are businessmen/women that don't understand the underpinnings of technology. It isn't a matter of if hackers will eventually be able to monitor, track, and use this information against customers (e.g. Hitting homes that have significant drops in usage while they're out of town) it's when. Furthermore, several of these meters have a remote IP enabled shutoff - can you image the havoc that could be wreaked when the encryption and authentication software in these meters is outstripped by new technologies? This is all worst case scenario stuff, and it isn't like these companies aren't always doing their due diligence; it's just that I feel social engineering and/or actual hacking makes this seem like an inevitable outcome.
Which is why you carefully add a tap ahead of the smart meter inside your house and use that tap for transient high current loads, like a welder or kiln, but leave your house on the meter. Much less likely to get caught, as your baseline usage is unchanged.
People who steal power are usually really greedy and steal most/all of it. The effect is that the power company sees a nice step function downward in usage. Makes it easy to identify cheats.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The article states "[s]ome consumers are worried about radio frequency radiation from the new meters." That's it. No "action groups," not even a sole scientist. Bad bad bad summary.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
" I would guess the jury's out on that one,"
no, it isn't. It's safe. The only people saying it isn't is dimwits and people looking to create a fake "controversy"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Though I have no idea regarding the RF tx concerns, I can speak a little about the privacy implications. first a little reading, Here is a link to the NIST-IR 7628, which describes guidelines for smartgrid security. Volume 2 focuses on privacy impact. http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/focus-on-countries/north-and-south-america-and-the-caribbean/united-states/trends-and-issues-united-states/information-and-communications-technology-united-states/cyber-security-united-states/nistir-7628-guidelines-for-smart-grid-cyber-security.html
it is already possible with analog meters to identify devices inside a home, simply by sampling the signal at the meter at an interval of less than 2 minutes. the faster the sample the more accurate. by comparing the signals to a database of common electrical devices researchers were able to profile device usage as early as 1992. obviously, up till now, most utilities coudn't afford the staff to sample most lines at that interval however.
The smart grid exacerbates this privacy issue, because it allows and in fact requires high speed sampling to accommodate Time-Of-Use billing, and because the meters can send usage information to the utility head end effortlessly with no additional cost.
the real issue with privacy however will not come for a few years: smart appliances. Several EDUs are already selling internet service through their smart meters, but there is effectively no option to firewall this connection as it travels over the power lines and any interference would be felony meter tampering.
So, imagine 5 years from now, you are buying a new TV. you don;t care about internet connectivity, but the device comes with it embedded, and there are very few options in the TVs menus for configuring it. It uses powerline networking, so in order to just turn it on, you have already connected it to the Internet. At this point, you basically have to trust your TV manufacturer to not report to advertisers what you watch, including stuff like pr0n. with SMART devices you have to trust the manufacture implicitly..
Another big focus for the smartgrid is Electric Vehicles. The plan at present is to have the car identify itself to the power network, along with its owners billing info, so that wherever you plug in to get a recharge, it appears on your monthly bill. this can easily be used to track you over long periods of time.
SG meter data can also be used to uncover hidden sources of power generation within your property, so if you hide your usage to maintain your privacy, that will likely be accessible to any adversarial party that requests it.
So, a well monitored smart meter can be used to tell your schedule, the size of your family, when you are home, when you are away, your approximate worth, enumerate your devices, log how/when/where (in your house) you use them, track your internet usage, how far you travel each day (and possibly where you went), the day of the week you go to the grocery, and what ever any device you plug in decides to send to third parties, all with no indication that anything is happening.
Are you so sure of this, dipshit? http://www.epa.gov/radtown/power-lines.html
Let's see:
Compared to being hit by sunlight:
param. .Water Meter ..Sun
energy. ..0.1 watts. .300 watts .1 sec/month .1 hr/day
exposure.
photon energy . 6E-25 Joules.. 3E-19 Joules
Looks to me like that Sun is DANGEROUS, exposing you to about 3,000 times more energy per unit time, for about 110,000 times longer, and with individual photons 500,000 times more energetic.
The 900MHz radio wave photons are so weak they can't excite any atom to any higher energy level, or cause any kind of chemical change, not by a factor of 1000 or more.
These are complicated electronic data devices geared and aimed at the government sector.
That they don't kill all puppies, kittens and babies in a 10 mile radius is amazing. We should consider that a win.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
RF is just a form of electromagnetic radiation you myopic moron.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
One issue that's been reported up here in BC is that smart meters have increased some customers' bills (according to the customer).
In most of the cases, it was just either human error or the billing system was just catching up on equalization payments vs. electricity actually used.
Many people have reported that their bills have actually come down a bit with the more accurate readings.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
So you're telling me that they're just as harmful as cellphones, and are just as much of a privacy invasion as cellphones?
Why don't we just strap a cellphone to the sides of our houses? Sounds like the general public would be more impressed if there was an android app that measured power usage.
If there were roaming bands of people looking to do such things, they could already do them. A chainsaw is cheaper than a computer if you want to kill the electricity for a whole branch of people. For an individual, all you have to do is pull the meter.
Besides, the utilities have a powerful incentive to keep the meters secure.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes they do.
(Dipshit understates my opinion of you.)
What they're not talking about, and the bigger problem, is that these meters, like any wireless technology, ARE HACKABLE!
How long before somebody, or a Nation, starts turning off the grid in countries going ahead with such technology..?
But they have the right to enter you're property with any work dealing with their meter.
Unless there is an easement permitting access for that purpose, they have no right to be on your property at all. If they have an easement they only have a right to be on the property defined by the easement. If they set one foot off the easement they are trespassing. Odds are that the power company has an easement to meter but not necessarily. I have seen cases where the meter was not on an easement and the power company (technically) had to get permission to come on the property to read it.
The headline ends in a question mark, but the answer is "Yes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
One of the things coming with smart meters is differential rates for electricity provided during peak and non-peak hours. I don't see this as a bad thing, but then I don't run an air conditioner. Setting my dishwasher to run after 9:00 am makes sense, for example.
The idiots prattling about RF sensitivity seem brain damaged to me, but not from RF. Around here they mostly move around in a fog of pot smoke.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Of course there's no dangerous RF. That's just plain stupid.
However, with regard to invasions of privacy... The meters are capable of reporting daily variations in consumption of electricity. Readable at a distance, a third party could assess when consumption levels are very low (house probably unoccupied) or inconsistently low for several days in a row (occupants probably away on vacation). So, what you basically have is a radio beacon that lights up "Rob us, were out".
I imagine that this could be fixed if there is a very good encryption and authentication/authorization scheme -- but how likely is that?
There are far wider safey and security issues as this paper from Ross Anderson at Camridge University shows: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/JSAC-draft.pdf. For me, the wider safety issue is the potential of a cyber attack using the remote off capability. From Anderson's paper:
"The presence of a remote off switch in all electricity meters can lead to strategic vulnerability: a capable adversary could switch off the lights using a cyber attack rather than having to physically bomb power stations or transformers."
When combined with the lack of a remote "on" switch, the potential for disruption is devastating. From the same paper (looking at the UK situation):
"Recovery from such an attack would be painful. As a matter of national survival, the government would probably authorise any electrician or other competent person to short-circuit dead meters. Utility contractors might need to spend a year or more visiting every house to rekey or replace them. Even this would involve a massive recruitment campaign; current utility and contractor staff are not reckoned to be sufficient to replace all meters with smart meters by 2022. What arrangements might be made to resolve billing disputes in the meantime is anyone’s guess."
Tin hats are the least of my worries!
jeremy@jeremybennett.com www.jeremybennett.com
I've heard (need confirmation) that most use a similar frequency band to wireless phone basestations and wifi ethernet. If all of those are safe, one would suspect smart meters are safe too.
Finally, after years of lurking, a subject I can speak with authority on.
I actually got to speak to a Georgia House committee on the subject of smart meters, since I work for one of the major manufacturers. Here are some of the things I told them...
Our meters use licensed 900Mhz FSK (not spread spectrum) bursts. An average electric meter transmits 6 times a day with 1 watt EIRP (off a PCB antenna in the meter), in bursts of about 180ms. Total on-air time is nominally 1 second per meter per day.
As for privacy, we use symmetric AES-256 encryption with per-meter keys for both uplink and downlink to the meters (our meters are twoway-capable). Keys are rotated generally every three months (yes, imagine rotating 4+ million encryption keys every few months, over a system with an aggregate bandwidth of about 12kb/s).
We sell a "remote-disconnect" option in our meters, but it's expensive and only used by electric companies in limited situations. While we can trigger a remote disconnect, in the interest of safety we cannot re-energize a meter without a very complicated dance. Instead, we send an arm-for-reengize command, and then tell the consumer to take their TV remote control outside and point it at the meter and hit the "POWER" button. An IR receiver in the meter face then causes the meter to re-energize.
One of the big complaints (after they get past the RF) of the anti-smart meter groups is the use of "dirty switching power supplies". According to the anti-smart-meter web sites, these switching power supplies cause surges on the AC mains, which somehow increase cancer risks up to 13 times. The power supplies in our meters are actually certified under 3 different FCC type ratings, and are somewhere north of 95% efficient buck-boost supplies. Since the load of the metrology and RF boards in the meter is minuscule, smart meters generally only draw milliwatts while running, and the chances of inducing large spikes onto the mains is non-existent.
I got to meet some of the people behind the anti-smart-meter campaigns. For the most part, they're nice elderly ladies who get their view of the world from Pat Robertson and Fox news. They crave some cause in their life, are experiencing health issues generally related to aging and unhealthy choices, and find any new technology (especially hard-to-understand, mandatory-use technology like smart meters) scary and use it as a good scapegoat for their health worries. Everyone here realizes that a web page is the ultimate printing press, and with enough Googling you can find some "expert" pushing some kind of "science" to support pretty much any view you wish to cling to. It's embarrassingly easy to put together a semi-literate sounding alarmist web page backed up by flaky pseudo-science and gather like-minded people to your way of thinking.
Bottom line is, as an electrical engineer, an extra class amateur radio operator, and a father, there are about a million things my kids run across every day that are more damaging or dangerous than smart meters. Most of those are naturally occurring (sunlight kills more people in a year via skin cancer than every smart meter I've ever played a part in will kill in a thousand years). If you need something to stress about or blame your poor health or weird medical condition on, please find a better scapegoat than smart meters.
If there were roaming bands of people looking to do such things, they could already do them. A chainsaw is cheaper than a computer if you want to kill the electricity for a whole branch of people. For an individual, all you have to do is pull the meter.
I don't see roving bands of people attempting to break into military facilities, the NRO or NASA. Foreign hackers on the other hand...
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
+4 funny
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think most of the others have already covered the RF side of things, so I'll discuss the privacy aspects. First of all, I do realize the meters have fairly high resolution when it comes to usage so there are some privacy concerns. Keep in mind that just because the meter can tell exactly what channel you are watching in a lab environment, it doesn't work that way in the real world. No utility has the desire to store data at that level of detail. The utility I work for will store data with 1 hour resolution. That means we will know how much power was used during a specific one hour interval. This alone has enormous storage and server requirements. Going to smaller intervals would do nothing for us and compound or storage requirements so it's a non starter. We are a for profit company and have no cost justification for that kind of system. We are also not storing customer information in the same system that we are storing meter data. The system storing meter data will just have a service delivery point so the data can be tied to a customer, but it raises the difficulty level.
As far a remote shutoff goes we are working very hard to make that system as secure as practical. Those commands will be considered privileged and limited to a small group of people. There will also be limits in place so it's not like I could issue a command to shut off 100,000 customers all at once. The security is being handled in a very similar fashion to how we handle our SCADA security where a couple of key strokes can actually shutoff decent sized parts of the grid in our service territory. Needless to say at my utility we are taking your privacy and security very seriously.
So in a nutshell with one hour resolution what could someone lean about you? Well your usage patterns would give some stuff away. Probably the same sort of stuff your neighbors already know. Daily habits such as what shift you work and what time you tend to go to bed at night and what time folks get up in the morning. That being said if your utility gives you access to your data via a portal, I would probably use a fairly decent password and not share it with the world.
Yeah, it is obvious the power company in intent on stealing secrets about your laundry habits rather than trying to balance infrastructure cost and capability.
If you think that information will stay with the power company, I've got some land to sell you in South Florida.
That data will be sold to everyone that wants it in the blink of an eye. Advertisers/marketers have no shame. And it will be subpoenaed by the authorities when when anyone in your block is under surveillance.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Yes. (Less labor hours collecting billing data, Less labor hours compiling billing data)
trying to provide you with better service
Ha ha ha. They're trying to set up a massive confuseopoly to collect more money while providing less service. Those meters are expensive and they're not providing them out of the goodness of their heart.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
See this Chaos Communication Congress talk for all the security mess around these things ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOArwu3lziQ
You get wrapped up in an arrest warrant for Theft of Services - and placed on a permanent list of suspected pot growers.
So, the question then becomes ... is the smart meter information encrypted? Can it be snooped? Can someone else get a hold of this data?
The issue isn't necessarily that PG&E is going to rob my house while I'm gone. The issue is whether or not generating that data, almost without consent or knowledge, is a good idea, period.
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
Actually, this is the entire idea behind the smart grid. The data is not for them to know how much to generate - as you pointed out, they already know that. The idea is to charge you more for the electricity that costs them more to generate. Not all power is generated equally cheaply. On a hot day with lots of A/C usage, they have to bring emergency generators on line. These burn very expensive fuels, such as natural gas, and cost them 10 times as much as the electricity generated by the much cheaper coal fired plants. They want to bill you a lot more for the times they're forced to bring those extra generators on line, because if they charge you more, you might change your mind about consuming electricity that's so expensive to produce. So the smart grid will use consumer demand to reduce their need to supply.
The smart meter's job is two-fold. One task is to record your usage depending on the rate. The other is to transmit the rates to your smart household appliances. This would be messages like "the current non-peak rate is $0.16/kWh" or "the peak rate from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM will be $3.25/kWh." If you have smart appliances that can read these messages, they can make their own decisions. You might configure your clothes dryer to run only when electricity is cheaper then $0.50/kWh, for example, meaning it would shut itself off during the really expensive peaks. Or you might configure your water heater to hold 140 degrees at $0.35/kWh rates, but 110 degrees at rates above that. This would give you the ability to make your own choices about placing peak demands on the power grid. You would think about if you really need 50 gallons of 140 degree hot water at 5:00 in the afternoon if it's going to cost you $7.00 extra per day.
The idea is simple: get people to cooperate to consume less energy. They've proven they won't do it for the environment, but they will do it for money.
John
Oh how I miss multinetsend
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
For me, the real dangers with smart meters, are coupled, big-data style data collection followed by well-targeted demand pricing. Remember the 'concept' Coca-Cola machine that made drinks more expensive when it was hotter?
Also, and I made a submission in the UK about this, I'd like the raw data stream to be available on the 'consumer' side rather than patronising LCDs with smiley and frowny faces, for example. The UK suppliers currently seem to believe that this is 'their' data exclusively, because, of course, as above, it's very valuable.
I'm pretty unconvinced that the RF, for example, is worse that all the other techno-**** that we have around us, already.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Go post the same thing in the Cisco story.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
No, it isn't. The sun is the number one source of disease caused by radiation exposure.
Indeed. One of the big issues with the whiners is that they drown out legitimate complaints. The "RF headache" crowd is so vocal that legitimate complains like 300% + billings get lost in the noise.
I know several people who have been overbilled. In one case it was that maintenance person mis-recorded the previous meter's last count before replacing it, in others it was just overbilling. IIRC in the news there was a case where person X was getting charged for his own power plus a neighbour's.
Uhm, a chainsaw to the power lines is more likely to get you caught or killed.
If they want to charge you differently based on the hour of the day, then yes they would need to know your hour by hour usage. If the supplier wishes to affect demand by charging higher prices during peak hours (thus lowering the peak usage), then they need to be able to collect usage data on an hourly basis. Utilities have to build to their peak demand. If the peak demand is twice the demand during other parts of the day, that means half your power plants are wasted except during that peak period.
The power company doesn't need to know your hour-by-hour usage to bill differently per hour, only your meter needs to know.
The utility can send current pricing to your smart meter for that hour and your meter can keep track of your charges and send it to the power company each month.
Not quite. RF is well understood. If it's ionizing it's potentially dangerous. It can also be non-ionizing but still cause molecular damage, like low-frequency UV still causes skin cancer. If it's high intensity, like IR heat or a powerful laser it can cause burns. If it causes dielectric heating, like microwaves, it can also burn. Otherwise, like almost all other cases, like cell or cordless phone antenna radiation, it's safe.
If enough people care about privacy, maybe there's a market for the development of an energy buffer (aka True AC battery). Today, this is inefficient as "AC batteries" are just DC batteries (and you get major losses converting to DC, storing it, and then converting it back to AC). Although you could potentially use something as primitive as a flywheel for AC energy storage, there are some chemical reactions that are inherently non-linear chemical reactions (e.g., Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction) that might be developed into AC batteries for energy storage.
If you had such an AC battery buffer, you'd just draw from the grid to charge the battery (presumably when the marginal price was low), and then use it when you needed it. The power company wouldn't be any wiser and in fact would probably thank you (as it will help them balance out peak load).
Although this is very futuristic, if you are paranoid today, you probably can approximate it somewhat by installing solar panels in your house. Instead of "selling" the power back to the grid (which the power company can interpret as you not using it), you could pseudorandomly sink the power to mask your energy usage back to the power company... So the reduction in sell back recovery would be the cost of privacy...
Just to clarify a point here. In the US we do have a right to privacy and it is not enshrined in the Constitution or its amendments. The Bill of Rights is not a complete list of all our rights, just a subset. The right to privacy comes from English common law and common sense.
So yes, I can say I have a right to X without it necessarily invoking the Constitution. In this case, people are claiming their right to privacy outweighs the need for the utility company to know at the house-and-quarter-hour level what my electricity usage is.
Incidentally, I agree that my right to privacy trumps their need because they can do exactly what they need to do by reporting my usage monthly and reading on the quarter-hour what my substation is using. They don't need to know what my house is using on the quarter hour and they certainly don't need to log that information where it is subject to misuse, theft or subpoena.
Like they could tell if a girl I had over was strapped to a Sybian naked or something?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Aren't smart meters more about differential rates?
It seems to me that the power companies are deathly afraid of losing their stranglehold on energy, so with all the government subsidized solar coming on line in California, and the forced-buy by the power company, the point of smart meters seems intended to be poised to implement an arbitrage system in order to game the power rates.
With an ordinary meter, if you provide power to the grid, the meter runs backwards: they pay you the same rate as you pay them, at least for power you "borrowed" during the night. But what if they could pay you less for the power you provide them than they charge for the power they provide you? Smart meters enable this business model and protect their monopolies.
Personally, I think the grid should be government owned and tax supported, and that power companies should have to pay to lease it. For the case of municipal power companies, to avoid establishing vertical monopolies and integration, they'd have to divest their generating capacity, but that's a small minority situation with power generation in the U.S..
Of course. They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using. What business is that of theirs?
Power Company Truck, Across the street from your house, Binoculars, Clipboard, 24/7... how about now?
You know it isn't that hard to tell if someone is home or not while driving past your house, smart meter or not installed, right?
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If by 'safe' you mean doesn't put out a harmful amount of RF, I would guess the jury's out on that one
No, RF is well understood. If it's non-ionizing, it's not harmful.
Well, sure, if it only eminates non-ionizing RF.
So, do we know, conclusively, that these smart meters do not output ionizing radiation? Have independent groups been allowed to study the devices, or have their specs been kept under tight wraps like the TSA's terahertz scanners?
Not trying to be arch or anything, just pointing out that our government hasn't been the most trustworthy of late, and these questions need to be asked.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Those meters are expensive and they're not providing them out of the goodness of their heart.
Correct. it is all about profit. The smart meters are far less expensive then overbuilding infrastructure and/or generating too much or too little power based on demand.
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To really get the sarcasm going, you should have put something more like "They are every bit as dangerous as a cellphone through a wall 25' from you."
If you have smart appliances that can read these messages, they can make their own decisions. You might configure your clothes dryer to run only when electricity is cheaper then $0.50/kWh, for example, meaning it would shut itself off during the really expensive peaks. Or you might configure your water heater to hold 140 degrees at $0.35/kWh rates, but 110 degrees at rates above that. This would give you the ability to make your own choices about placing peak demands on the power grid. You would think about if you really need 50 gallons of 140 degree hot water at 5:00 in the afternoon if it's going to cost you $7.00 extra per day.
The one I'm waiting for is being able to tell an electric car to charge overnight at $0.10/kWh, and discharge into the grid at $0.20/kWh on-peak when I get home from work. If you apply the "what if everyone did that?" test to that, it would really kill the usage peaks the power companies have to deal with now.
" I would guess the jury's out on that one," no, it isn't. It's safe. The only people saying it isn't is dimwits and people looking to create a fake "controversy"
Actually, I would say the dimwits are the ones who claim that RF is safe, ignoring the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing RF signals.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
What business does a server admin have in knowing hours by hours or minute by minute load? Any admin of an infrastructure probably wants to know usage outside of monthly intervals.
They already have instrumentation at the substations that tells them how much power my neighborhood
"Neighborhood"?! Shit, we have one substation for the entire city of 20k people, excluding the factories. They may want to know a little more about how power is used in different sections of the city.
While data must be collected at the house level, maybe we need laws stating that only monthly data can be saved by customer and any lesser interval must be stored by city section(some larger logical unit).
The provider knows only how much you consume every month or so. A major point of smart meters is that they allow metering on an hourly basis or even faster, so that if you run your power-hungry appliances at night, when power is cheaper, you can save a few pennies. The idea is good: since you make the decision of when consuming the power, you should be entrusted also the responsibility of paying up.
Currently, if you run your washing machine at 8 AM (peak) or 3 AM (minimum), a kWh is a kWh and you pay for it as such. The company simply uses the average price, and as a result people run their appliances when it fits them best, i.e. often at similar times since most people have similar schedules. This causes power surges that stress the grid, which has to be oversized.
If people have some incentive in using power when it is cheaper (i.e. less people are using it), the surges will be smaller, the grid will not have to be oversized as much, and the savings can be used to fatten the bonuses of the power company CEOs.
The privacy concern is that the company knows in real time how much power you are consuming. This can be used to assess whether you are at home, if you are cooking, have guests, have your computer on and so on. The information needs to be stored until the next invoice, hence the privacy concerns.
There are also security concerns: smart meters are small networked computers and can be hacked. Now no one would obviously want to hack your fridge, but you can imagine what would happen if a worm was written to switch off all refrigerating units in any house, mall and storehouse at the same time in an entire country. Worse, used against hospitals or as a prelude to military attack. Ransomware could be used as a ultimate weapon against an entire country. If you think our economy is critically dependent on the Internet, imagine what would happen if the electric grid had the stability of Windows 95, we would go straight back to late bronze age.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Stucco is a popular choice for homes in CA.
Did you know that stucco uses, as a foundational base, a wire mesh that resembles chicken wire?
And, this wire mesh does a reasonable job as a stand-in for a Faraday cage.
So even if the level of RF were somehow dangerous (it's not), the average CA house is actually fairly well-insulated against it.
Yeah, it is obvious the power company in intent on stealing secrets about your laundry habits rather than trying to balance infrastructure cost and capability.
If you think that information will stay with the power company, I've got some land to sell you in South Florida.
That data will be sold to everyone that wants it in the blink of an eye. Advertisers/marketers have no shame. And it will be subpoenaed by the authorities when when anyone in your block is under surveillance.
How's that? Do telephone companies do the same with your calling / texting history? Do you get random telemarketers calling up and saying 'We see you make a lot of calls to North Dakota during the daytime, would you like to switch to our company and subscribe to our long distance super-happiness-savings bundle?'
Utilities fall under much stricter ethical codes and privacy policies than does Facebook, thank goodness. Aggregate, anonymized data can be shared, but personally identifying information is not up for grabs (well, except by subpoena, I suppose). I'm not sure what advantage advertisers would glean from knowing that '90% of households in this neighborhood typically see a power usage spike around 7:00 pm on Thursdays'...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Right now, utility companies bill you on how much you used. Be it water, electric, gas, etc. They can either monitor your use remotely, but inaccurately (usually), or they need someone to drive around and check the numbers with a short-range reader (they don't usually walk up to meters and read them manually anymore). So what they get now is a big chunk of data showing how much you've used over the past 2 weeks or month. With smart meters, all the extra information they're getting is really interval data. Instead of getting a read every day (which they still get, as register reads), they can get reads as often as in 2 second intervals (15 and 30 minutes are much more common). That just shows the household's usage over that interval. It does not reveal anything about what was done with the resource. Yes, you can argue that there are ways to calculate the consumption of various resources of certain activities and guess what someone is doing or determine if someone is away, but it's purely conjecture and such an analysis would be incredibly inaccurate in a 15 minute interval (nobody stores 2 second intervals, unless Google got into the game). There's just no business use in it doing that, and I've never seen MDM software nor analytic software pointed at trying to guess what someone is doing with a resource.
There are, however, HANs (Home Area Networks) that are consumer-based only, and that don't transmit information to your ISP. They collect significantly more invasive information, primarily for your own monitoring purposes. They can collect information as specific as how much power a specific outlet used, how much power your AC/Heater or washer/dryer used, and can be modified with plugins to automatically rate-limit certain activities, like reducing A/C and heating costs when you're away automatically to save power. But this is entirely up to the consumer; this is a HAN, not a smart meter. What you do with that kind of data, whether you keep it for personal record keeping or publish it, is completely up to you.
To draw an analogy at why the smart metering thing is a non-issue really, both your bank and your credit lender already know "how much of a resource you're using" and earning, too. And your credit lender (for your credit card, eg) can potentially know much more about your purchases. So unless you buy EVERYTHING with cash, you're already giving very valuable data for advertisers over to people who actually want to know your spending habits. Not that I agree with the practice, but it's very real. So it's not really an argument to complain that "someone might know how much electricity I used over an arbitrary 15 minute interval" when someone knows exactly how much money you spent, and someone else knows exactly where you spent it.
In the end, your utility already knows your usage in month periods. Knowing it in 15 minute intervals isn't going to tell them that you were watching porn on 2 monitors while listening to Justin Bieber on your radio while cooking a Ramen Noodle, with your AC set to 71 degrees and 2 ceiling fans set to low with a total of 5 13W CFL lights on while drying a load of your underwear. Let's be realistic, people.
Before they changed my meter, I could walk outside and compute the rate I was using electricity, by measuring revolutions on a spinning wheel. With the new meter, the electronic display just flashes the total kilowatt-hour usage every few seconds, which is absolutely useless for getting an instantaneous rate. They promise all these cool features to come in the future, but it all looks like a lie. I was bamboozled.
Yes, we know conclusively that they put out less than one watt (generally much less than one watt) of non-ionizing radiation in the ISM band, around 902 MHz, or possibly a few milliwatts in the 2.4GHz band, depending on the tech inside it. They are fully compliant with Part 15 of the FCC rules.
They don't need high power transmitters because they communicate to a local neighborhood "concentrator" operated by the utility, and if they can't reach it directly they can arrange themselves using mesh networking to bounce the signal from meter to meter - up to 5 hops. Furthermore, they only communicate periodically, transmitting for only a second or two at a time a couple of times per day.
Even the ham radio operators aren't concerned about the potential for interference with their gear, and they're the first ones to raise a stink when someone starts talking about deploying a ubiquitous new RF-based technology.
There is no known safety risk associated with exposure to these low levels of RF radiation.
John
From TFS(ummary):
Here's two things...
I would not follow your heater example because there is a good reason for the 140 degrees. If you stay below that for a significant time, you are breeding all sorts of nasty germs. Again I would not trade the risk they pose for a couple of bucks.
Exactly what I wanted to know.
Thanks for providing the information, as well as doing so without being a dick about it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't think smart meters omit any more RF than a cell phone or a wi-fi router. These same people that are afraid of smart meters probably talk on their cell phones (which involves putting the contraption against your head) on a daily basis. In my opinion, smart meter infrastructure has the potential to change how we consume energy. There's already some cool companies like Opower and SwitchHop leading the charge.
Per the PG&E FAQ:
Do electric SmartMeters constantly emit RF?
No. SmartMeters communicate intermittently, with each RF-signal typically lasting from 2 to 20 milliseconds. These intermittent signals total, on average, 45 seconds per day. For the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day, the meter is not transmitting any RF.
If someone wants to reduce RF exposure, they can start by getting rid of their landline wireless phone, their cell phone, their wifi access point, and - in particular - their electric blanket. The meter isn't even a player in this game.
Luke, help me take this mask off
In New Hampshire, a couple of our libertarian legislators sponsored and successfully passed a bill to prohibit utility companies from installing these things without the owner's express consent to do so.
Liberty in your lifetime
As opposed to the kid I just sent to get his ball out of your yard for $1. Or me peeking over your fence at your current meter.
You know it isn't that hard to tell if someone is home or not while driving past your house, smart meter or not installed, right?
All you can see of my house from the road is a bit of my roof and one or two windows, and they appear at just a small fraction of an inch in size from the road. So actually, it is that hard, and harder. On the other hand, if you just watched the volume of network traffic to my house with a wireless antenna you could probably get a pretty clear idea.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
companies. They do not want you to be able to accurately track your usage or load balance. Then they could`nt charge you fraudulently.
To shut off the power the wardriver would have to break the Wifi encryption and the data encryption. By the way, In British Columbia, Canada a wardriver couldn't do it because the meter does can not cut off the house power as it does not have the capability. In BC it is a meter only and does not control the power.
Obviously an event of this magnitude means you need to turn on your TV, which will be playing old reruns. Next thing you know, the electric company will be trying to muscle out the Nielsen Rating people - oh, noes!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I see a market for a whole house power regenerator. Incorporate an isolation transformer into the design. Basically it will be to power what Privoxy is to the internet.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Would you rather be bumped by several cars at low speed over and over or hit with a truck moving quickly just once?
Also what sort of radiation is the highly radioactive fluid producing? Alpha? Beta? Gamma? Is the cross section energy density similar to that of the UV coming from the sun? What position on the Earth are we using a reference, here? A sunny beach in the polar regions, or near the equator?
I'll stand 20 or so centimetres away from an intense alpha source all day of the week, but I won't stand out in direct sunlight on a beach for more than about half an hour without coving up due to burning.
Looking at the other side of the coin, it also lets them charge less for electricity that costs them less to generate, giving people a new opportunity to save money.
And part of that is reducing the need to build additional, costly, unsightly power plants.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Powerlines don't emit RF, you dipshit
I can see why you didn't log in!
Ah, they say never laugh at the mentally retarded, but sometimes you can't help it.
The US has a capacity problem - we haven't built a major generating plant in decades and have been living off the overcapacity that was built in the 1960s and 1970s. Well, we have used that up and have been building what "peaker" plants that could be built to try to fill in the gaps. There is a serious capacity problem today.
See all the generating plants being built to solve this problem? It takes about five years to build a large coal-fired plant and more like ten years to build a nuclear plant. We probably should not be building new coal plants today but there is little choice. There is one nuclear plant on the drawing board and the government is probably going to be financing it because private financing isn't very supportive of it. Not only that, but the chances are still pretty good that the NIMBY folks will prevent the plant from being built at all.
Will conservation fix this problem? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that we are still seeing growth in consumption in the US based on immigrant population moving in and businesses using more and more power for lighting and computers. The big factories that have all gone to China aren't there anymore but they were rather small concentrations that sometimes generated their own electricity. But every time someone opens a real estate office there are a bunch of lights and computers that are going to be running at least eight hours a day. And when a few guys from Mexico come to the US it is another apartment with TVs and microwaves being used during the critical peak consumption times. No, there is no way that conservation is going to make a sigificant dent in this.
One possible solution, if you want to call it that, is where your smart meter simply turns off the power to homes during the day. You aren't home and if nobody opens the refrigerator the food will be fine. The problem is that this works in a lot of areas with mixed use between homes and offices but it doesn't really help if you have a big suburb with little or no commercial use. But it is likely to be implemented anyway making what was once a hallmark of American society - ubiquitous and reliable electric power - something of a relic.
The idea is to charge you more for the electricity that costs them more to generate.
See:
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using,
Which all they need is a dumb clock on the meter and two counters.
The idea of constantly changing rates isn't needed. They can set rates on a monthly or yearly. They are not nearly agile enough to justify having peak rates jump 3 cents next Sunday. The idea that you can program your devices to know what the current rate is and behave accordingly is a neat idea. But you don't need smart meters. You need a web connection and a webpage. Which, if your device is that smart, it will have anyway.
Well, I could walk over and look at you dumb power meter to see how much power you are using. But that's OK since I'm not using wi-fi and a laptop, right?
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Have gnu, will travel.
Today generation, distribution and consumers are three different companies in the US. And it has been complicated so much by the overall lack of capacity that the distribution company cannot simply buy electricity from a single supplier anymore. They are forced to gather as much power as they can by dealing with multiple providers.
I don't think there is much profit in generation today and the difficulties are such that it is impossible to build a new generating plant. Nobody has built a large plant (over 1000MW) in the US in decades. Today the focus would seem to be in building the plants in Mexico and Canada and shipping the electricity into the US.
Government subsidy of solar power for homeowners has just about ended. You used to be able to get about half the system paid for but today it is more like 25% and much of that is spread out over many years of tax credits. So in order to put even a small 6-8KW PV system on your roof is going to cost you $30,000 and you can expect only $10,000 from various government and industry sources to cover this. This means you are going to have to put up $30,000 and get $10,000 back the next year. Maybe. You begin to see why the solar leasing folks are having a good time these days where you do not buy the system but only lease it - it significantly reduces the upfront cost.
By the way, net metering doesn't really make your wattmeter run backwards. There are two meters and there are different rates already, at least for most of the utilities that are doing this. Naw, if you really want to smack the utilities around you need to go to a battery system where you are charging the batteries during the day and not pulling from a grid ever. Sure, a cloudy day might mean the refrigerator shuts off at 9PM until the sun comes out the next day, but that is what it means to be free of the utility monopoly.
You're using invalid assumptions: that there is a set or predicted period of time that is "peak" and "non-peak", and that all peak power always costs the same to produce. While that's one way to simplify the issue when all you have is a clock and a peak-meter, it's not very effective as an instrument of driving real change. The smart grid will have an up-to-the-minute picture of generation and load. If they have to bring 100 megawatts of temporary generators on-line, and the natural gas to fire them up is costing $10/MMBtu today, they can figure out the rate to charge right now would be $2.50/kWh, and that they plan on holding it there until demand drops to the point where they can power down those generators. If the price of gas goes to $11/MMBtu tomorrow, they will charge $2.75/kWh tomorrow.
And let's say they approach their production capacity even with all the auxiliary generators on line. If they raise the price to $2.75/kWh at 3:00 PM yet not enough people cut back, they could raise the price to $4.00/kWh at 4:00 PM. With a smart grid, they know that more and more equipment will shut itself down as the prices get higher. Instead of instituting a rolling blackout across the region, they can just raise the rates and people and businesses will voluntarily conserve for economic reasons.
John
As well as dispelling the myths surrounding them, from the lead security researcher for Itron Inc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ePWfR6A4_o
You think they're doing this to give you a discount? They're doing this because a new power plant costs at least $1.5 billion dollars to construct, and nobody wants one in their back yard because we know they dump mercury all over the surrounding area. They aren't building new plants at a rate to match the current increase in demand because they can't.
This isn't about cost savings, this is about cost avoidance. If you want to use your oven at supper time, and it's going to cost you $20 to bake a potato, you'll go for a sandwich instead.
Energy costs are going to rise significantly over the next few decades. The supply of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) is finite and decreasing, while our consumption continues to rise. The situation is unsustainable. When we get to that point in the future that doesn't have any cheap energy, society will be in one of two places: either we'll be at an unhappy point of austerity, where our consumption is substantially less than it is today; or we'll be at a point of social chaos, where we've transitioned into a scene from a Mad Max movie. The smart grid at least is a step in the direction of controlling consumption.
Being able to tie the price to the actual cost is one way to alter demand.
And this model nicely incorporates alternate sources of energy, such as renewables. Higher energy rates will increase adoption of technologies such as solar panels and fuel cells, which in turn will reduce demand on the grid, keeping overall prices lower for a longer period of time. Small producers (homeowners with solar panels) can put their excess generating capacity on the grid as well, turning a profit for themselves while reducing the need for new plants.
John
I don't know about you but my mobile phone carrier keeps records of exactly when I place phone calls, how long I stay on the line, and even who I call! Can you believe these guys??
There are more legitimate concerns than you think. This is a very timely article for me. Just got a letter last week announcing that the power company will soon install a smart meter at our place. So I am researching the matter.
I'm not too worried about the health effects of radio waves. I have limited the RFI at my place, but this is mainly for other reasons. Still have a landline and my cell phone stays off 99% of the time. Cell phones are expensive! Didn't have as much luck stopping the rest of the family from embracing the cordless handset, but they quit working long ago when the batteries wore out. I don't use wifi around the home, mostly because wifi is slow and unreliable compared to wired networking, but also it's one less access point to lock down. We also receive plain old TV signals. (Well, the new digital kind, not the old analog). I don't want interference with that. Don't think a squawking smart meter will screw up reception, but it could. I've replaced fluorescent light ballasts and computers (in one case, a hard drive) that were generating RFI.
But the other problems.... I know PG&E and TXU. PG&E bastards tried to double bill me and my landlord. Naturally the landlord suspected me first, but I had kept all my bills and was able to show that I had indeed signed up and paid for my electricity. Our two bills showed the same meter number, same periods of time. Just an innocent billing error! Lately, energy providers been deliberately making the bills more complicated and confusing. They promote a low rate, and don't mention this "delivery charge" that makes the actual rate much higher. They have this "base charge", funny fees, 2 year contracts, taxes etc. Think you're going to go all green and build a "net zero energy" home, generating your own solar power but still be attached to the grid? In that case, they'll try to set you up. They'll buy all your power from you at the wholesale rate (or even, at a discount from that), then sell whatever you use back to you at the retail rate. They still make money during those times when they don't actually deliver any power! You pay to use your own power! They've taken to all the crud the telecomms have been pulling. Then they throw around all these "options", sell you on this idea that you have the choice of picking the plan that suits you best. Yeah, right. All that really is, is more ways for you to go wrong, and the kicker is they can convince you it's your fault because you had choice! It's a false choice. I don't trust corporations. Shades of Enron. Telecomms actively try to suppress research into the health effects of cell phone radiation. And power companies claim smart meters will save us money, which is too big a stretch for me. The claim goes like this: because you can monitor your power usage more closely, you will more quickly notice when you are wasting power. Knowledge is power, so to speak. Obviously they do not save power in themselves. If anything, they use more of your power to transmit RF signals. Slaving power hungry devices to them comes later.
I note their web sites about smart meters don't address the issues that have been raised. How often are these meters inaccurate? How much power do they use? Is it 1 Watt-hour? 5 Wh? How often and how much power are their RF transmissions? They may be insignificant, but I'd still like the hard numbers. Do they add a "smart meter fee" to the electric bill, and how much is it? The power companies promoting these meters absolutely should address these concerns. Not to do so is less than honest. Since they are ignoring these issues, their marketing campaign about saving power is obvious bunk, and their reputation is poor, my inclination is to decline the smart meter.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Ultimately, the purpose of a smart meter is to enable charging different rates for different times of the day. No, we're not doing it yet, but that is the eventual reason for smart meters. Getting away from meter readers is a side benefit. The goal is "peak shaving", by enforcing higher rates during peaks. We'll encourage you not to run your A/C in the afternoon by charging triple the rate during that time. So, yeah, the power company will need to know _when_ you used the electricity to bill you correctly.
I've been using watt-a-vision for the past year and have been pretty happy with it, but it connects to the old style meters. Now I'm in an apt building, so I'm not sure if I'm effected but here's my opinion on the pros and cons.
I should make clear that this won't be the same experience but I'll try to give my opinions on each (some assumptions are going to be made)
Info: the watt-a-vison just is an optical counter that hooks up to a box that connects via wifi to my network, sends stats to watt-a-vision, where I can view a graph of my usage
Pros
I can monitor my electricty usage from one central point, unlike tweet-a-watt like devices.
It's set and forget.
It helps a lot when I forget to turn off my ps3.
I can backcheck my usage against my bill.
Since it's got a web interface, I can use any modern device for viewing.
It's on *my* network with my security
Cons:
Somebody else has an idea of what my energy consumption is (watt-a-vision) and could determine occupancy based on usage.
Now I'm going to talk about the SoCal Edision implementation.
Their own network,with means if it's compromised, somebody is going to have a lot of info.
No way to backcheck your usage independately unless you put tweet-a-watt devices everywhere.
As for the RF issue, I dunno how much these things transmit but I do have an RF meter and there's several apps on the iphone at least that will use the magnetometers as a teslameter, so that could be useful.
With that being said, I'm about about smart technology, but I would rather the tech be mostly in my hands than mostly in any company's.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
No, there is no way that conservation is going to make a sigificant dent in this.
Considering that lighting makes up 25% of the energy consumption in the U.S., there is huge room for improvement. Businesses are being given rebates to install motion detectors to cut lighting use, and installing high efficiency output T5 fixtures as an alternative to incandescent bulbs or the traditional T12 tubes. From my cube, I estimate there are 350 fluorescent fixtures on this floor, and each is loaded with 2 30 W tubes. That's 21kWh casting light on a hundred cubes, 90 of which are empty because of the impending holiday. Just because we can consume it doesn't mean we should.
One possible solution, if you want to call it that, is where your smart meter simply turns off the power to homes during the day. You aren't home and if nobody opens the refrigerator the food will be fine. The problem is that this works in a lot of areas with mixed use between homes and offices but it doesn't really help if you have a big suburb with little or no commercial use. But it is likely to be implemented anyway making what was once a hallmark of American society - ubiquitous and reliable electric power - something of a relic.
That's little different from today's rolling blackout, used because they don't have the fine grained control needed to offer a demand-based reduction in consumption. And yes, we have had those right here in the good old U.S.A. You could call such a meter a not-very-smart house controller, and it would be an affordable option for people who aren't going to rewire their houses or replace their appliances with smarter versions. I have such a device controlling my A/C system, and it's automatically participating in today's peak demand by shutting off for 20 minutes out of each hour, meaning my house will be about 80 degrees instead of 76. (I expect the dogs are smart enough to go downstairs and lie on the concrete if they're too hot upstairs.) A truly smart grid will include control over individual appliances that will enable us consumers to make the choice of what to black out and when. If you're fine spending $10/day on heating your water when you're not home, that's your choice. Since I want to avoid the higher rates, I'll let my smart house cut the hot water when I'm not likely to need a shower.
John
Everything's going to kill you. Liberals are starting to sound like Muslim elders in Nigeria who claim that infidel medicine including polio vaccines are a Zionist plot to sterilize Muslims and make their genitals fall off.
Smart meters (the ones in my area) use a mesh network and communicate with each to deliver you usage, there has been a proof of concept malware (Google it) written for my smart meter mode that could propagate via the mesh, since my power can be shut off with a signal from the provider how hard would it be to code a time bomb that
A: Shuts off everyone's power at the same time, or
B: Pulses the power on and off, what would this do to the grid?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The objective of changing to the minute by minute ("time of use") refinement that you advocate is to prevent consumers from being able to reliably predict their energy cost before they consume it.
That's a crock of baloney, and you better have some evidence to back up those claims. While I'm not a fan of most energy companies' behavior (my co-op excluded), the real problems are visibly evident today. They can no longer increase supply to match demand. I hear this from large companies as well as from my own co-op.
Electric plants are already crazy expensive to build, and there's a strong NIMBY against them everywhere. Yet new customers come on line every day due to population and economic growth. So if they can't increase supply, there is only one option remaining: curb demand. They're doing this in at least two different ways: promoting conservation through rebates for energy efficient appliances and light bulbs; and raising rates. And conservation only goes so far.
So they need ways to raise rates that are going to get people to reduce demand. Since there are the different flavors of generation (peak and non-peak), and we know peak power costs an order of magnitude more than non-peak power, it makes the most sense to reduce the demand for peak power consumption. Passing on the actual real-time costs to consumers instead of burying the costs in our regular rates will drive the behavior they're looking for: a strong reduction in peak consumption. A smart grid enables that.
If allowed to run unchecked, will it be abused by whoever rises to become Enron 2.0? No doubt. So we still need a strong public voice to at least minimize the impact of day traders. Our PUC has done a reasonably good job of that so far, and there's no reason not to continue trusting them.
John
Actually the utility may not actually know data from the substations either. They may not own the substations (which are owned by distribution networks) or they may not have the substations networked. Some utilities are municipal, meaning the city itself is the electricity utility but it gets the electricity from outside its borders in many cases. The substation may serve many neighborhoods so you can't easily distinguish which neighborhoods are high usage and which are not.
Basically utilities buy electricity from the transmission and distribution grids and sell it to the end customers. They may have their own electricity generating stations but that power is just put up onto the grid where it may be shared with other utilities.
As a gross stereotype, the big national transmission operators know exactly where the electricity is, where it's coming from and where it's going. The distribution network have a good idea but not as clearly defined as transmission guys. The local utilities tend to have the least amount of data about what's happening. (differences between transmission and distribution are a bit fuzzy but relate to the voltage on the lines and distances involved; not sure how this is handled in other countries)
Most utilities in the US do have oversight from government agencies or commissions (ie, PUCs or public utility commisions). For example increases in rates have to be approved by PUCs at least in California. Phone companies have a great degree of freedom from the FCC in comparison.
. . . They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using. What business is that of theirs?
. . . but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
. . . they don't need to know when I'm doing laundry, when I go to work, when my house is vacant because I'm on vacation, etc.
If one needed an alibi, the minute by minute readings could be corroboration the accused was home puttering around -- it beats using a dog bark (i.e. OJ Simpson)
In California a few decades ago people figured out that there was no incentive for the utilities to conserve electricity or to encourage customers to conserve. On the contrary it was in the utilities best interests to convince customers to use as much as they could because that meant a bigger profit. So the rules were changed so that utilities were given a fixed revenue per year. If the utility spent less than this per year then they just pocketed the extra, if the customers used too much power then the utilities lost money. So now it was in the utility's best interest to conserve power and to convince customers to use less power, rather than just building more generators, as conservation meant more profits.
Also electricity generation is not something that is easily turned on and off. A hydroelectric dam generates just as much electricity at noon when everyone is using power than it does at night time. There are extra coal fired "peaker" generators that can be fired up in the day and left off at night but these are dirty and expensive. You don't want to use them if you don't have to. Then there are renewable energy sources that you use if you can; wind turbines are nice but you can't just turn them on and off at will. So to optimize your energy usage (and thus profits) there are a lot of variable to juggle. Most of this will probably be to measurements and networking of the distribution networks rather than meters on individual homes, much of which does not exist. But a lot of very useful information comes from the homes themselves.
For example, you want to have a fixed voltage that is on the lines, too high or too low will reduce power loss, and you want the AC voltage to be balanced across all three phases (via capacitor/inductor banks). There are cases where the utility thought the neighborhood was getting standard 115 volts but the smart meters were all reporting less voltage being delivered, which led the utilities to discover some faulty balancing that would not have been discovered just by measuring at the transformers.
And if you don't have smart meters then everything will cost you more than it does today.
RF-block rated SPF 40. Smear it on your head at all times. The titanium dioxide will block the harmful mind control rays.
They can measure and report multiple times pr hour and may send data wirelessly so as to be picked up by people interested in your power use. It may be people wanting to know if you are really at home, or people wanting to diturb the system to screw with your bill.
You use advanced light-switches with randomizing on/off times to fake being at home, but you don't cook dinners or take showers making your power consumption very low and not peaking in the right places. This could easily indicate to a thief that you are not home.
In addition there are talks of shutting off individual meters/circuits by the e-works through these smart meters.
What kind of safeguards are there to prevent others (insert misused word: hackers) from doing the same?
They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using.
I don't care if the power company knows. What I care about is who they're selling that information to in minute-by-minute increments, which therefore includes what hours I keep, when I'm watching TV, etc. All they have to do is create a reasonable privacy policy.
The RF stuff is 1% tinfoil hatters and 99% red herring to make the anti-smart-meter crowd look like a bunch of tinfoil hatters.
The future is in natural gas (which is enviro-friendly and cheaper than coal), followed by solar (which is rapidly growing closer to cost-feasible, but not there yet). I'm not too concerned, personally. I also think the overreaction to nuclear will subside somewhat.
I don't care for the entire concept. For one, the utilities are for use. If a person uses more, they pay more. If you use less, you pay less. The only thing smart meters are for, is CONTROL. Just like anything else, you get the public "use" to giving up more & more of your personal liberties, then, at the appropriate time, when THEY think you are using too much of anything, they can effectively CUT YOU OFF. Oh, but it is for the greater good bla bla bla. Yep, the greater good of GOVERNMENT. You think any of the politburo of the U.S. government is going to give up one little thing? Heck no. They can bypass TSA, bypass the laws they "set down" for everyone else, and on and on. Time for another revolution and throw these clowns out, FROM BOTH PARTIES.
At my previous employer I have been involved in developing a system to measure the usage of utilities, our goal was to give the consumers a good insight into their power usage and using the data to give advise on how to lower their bills (and save the earth of course). We need to get smarter to reduce the waste of resources! And because people are apparently too stupid to think about this kind of stuff themselves (use the washing machine in the low rate hours or something similar can be a big save) we have to develop technology to aid them in this process. Another important point is, that in order to allow a safe power network with decentralised power generation (pv panels, wind turbines on consumer homes etc) we need to have a smart network down to the lowest level. Don't forget that this is also an important reason for smart meters apart from the remote measurements! Any complaints about 'bad RF' are bollocks and I feel surprised that can even be taken seriously on /.
I can imagine that the tinfoil hat crowd wants to make a big issue about privacy, and they do have a small point (yet there are so many other privacy holes in our lives leaking information). But in my professional opinion the benefits in this case outweigh the drawbacks. We need smart meters to get our grids into the 21st century.
(I am an electrical engineer with experience in measurement systems and EMC, at the moment I am working on wireless sensor networks.)
... this whole discussion Funny? or perhaps Troll? There sure are a lot of paranoid people out there.
Are they safe? at least in Australia (VIC,SA,NSW) they are. What's this I read about dangerous levels of RF? C'mon, step away from your microwave, fella. Now on to the serious stuff that I felt like addressing.
Up until 2 years ago, I had worked for a reputable power company (if there ever was one!) in Australia for nearly 10 years and when I would speak to the customer service guys, they would always make fun of customers who wanted to know "What appliance is using all of my power??" and "I'm never home, how is my power bill so high???" and so forth -- This is where smart metering comes into affect. It takes 15 or 30 minute interval reads (depending on the meter model) as well as the power factor (kVa) and for someone working for the power retailer, they can export the data into an easy to read spreadsheet which allows for easy investigation as to what the hell is using a shit ton of power at 3am (whoops, forgot about that time switch for the pool heater!)
A lot of the smart meters in Australia do not give a general read-out of a users power consumption unlike the old 5 and 6 dial meters. They take interval reads and the information that is displayed on the meter, if anything, displays less information than what the older ones used to (usually displaying if it's online or not). I think some of the models don't even give you any readout unless the probe from the Meter Reader is inserted. (yes, smart meters here still have meter readers. We're still a while away from automatic reads)
Yes, prying eyes from those who work at retailers or DB's might be able to see your energy habits, but more importantly, the end customer can also see which means they can make more inclined choices of the appliances they use and the times they use some of these appliances (by the addition of Peak and Off Peak rates) -- If someone can see they get charged less per kWh between 8pm-8am, they're going to use their Washing Machine or Dryer at night. Without smart (interval) metering, this would not be possible. It also means people will start to take more notice of those silly "Energy Rating" stickers on appliances.
I hope this isn't too much shinfo but at least in Australia, there is a huge (mostly negative) misconception towards smart metering, usually thanks to the media.
To be fair, there are a group of people who claim to be ridiculously, rabidly, anti-RF anything, even allergic to Wi-Fi, and well beyond logic to the point of hysteria. And there are other people who have learned to echo similar baseless and ludicrous claims to oppose any political or technological changes they don't like when those changes involve RF.
One of the more dramatic cases of this happened a few years ago in Craigavon, South Africa. There was a group of people living in the town who came down with mysterious headaches and ailments and rashes immediately after an iBurst tower was erected in the town and was powered up. They claimed their problems subsided within minutes or hours after leaving the vicinity of the tower, and that their symptoms weren't fully gone only until after a full month away from the tower.
The townspeople held some protests, and eventually a meeting was arranged with the CEO of iBurst. At the meeting he agreed to work with the town to turn off the tower to see if that would help their symptoms go away. He also informed them that they were receiving a dose less than one ten-thousandth of the international safety standards for cell tower emissions, and that their tower was incapable of causing the problems they were complaining of. Yet the townspeople still stood up in front of the meeting and listed off their ailments, and offered the various proofs that their symptoms went away as soon as they left the area of the tower. But what the townspeople weren't told until after the meeting is that the tower had actually been switched off as a result of their first protests, and had remained powered off for over six weeks prior to the date of the meeting itself; this fact was confirmed by the logs from the company who had purchased the tower and had been unable to provide service for the prior six weeks. Nobody from the town showed up at the followup meetings held a month later. You can read about it here.
The sad part is that even though every single one of them can and will be exposed as a liar, people still use these anti-scientific anecdotes as reasons to oppose whatever it is they don't like or understand. The anti-vaccine group rallies around a few noisy people who had unfortunate losses for reasons unrelated to the vaccines, and then political opportunists pick these up as rallying cries, unconcerned about the very real deaths they're causing in kids who go un-vaccinated.
The smart grid meters are plagued with these kinds of baseless accusations because there is a group of people who are politically opposed to them. They muddy the topic with whatever lies they can to get people to "raise the question". So when you posted your original comment regarding safety, you didn't ask a question in a way that distinguished yourself from the anti-science crowd - instead, you used the term "the jury's still out", which sounds exactly like their statements regarding anything they are trying to appear neutral or thoughtful on, yet are still trying to keep a controversy brewing. And I think that's why some people were unkind in their responses to you. Politics aside, no anti-science viewpoint is ever looked upon kindly by most slashdotters.
John
Power company then installs data-slurping, microwave-broadcasting devices in homes that never asked for them, collects "cost recovery" money to pay for them, offers tiered pricing that doesn't actually save any money over the old pricing, and charges additional fees to opt out of the smart meter program. Dear power company, I want to punch you in the face.
I don't see roving bands of people attempting to break into military facilities, the NRO or NASA.
Probably not the best analogy... I'm pretty sure that spycraft is alive and well.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Are they safe? Probably. There are lots of RF devices in and around people's homes that nobody has complained about (with one notable exception). Cordless phones, wifi, microwave ovens, and last but certainly most controversial, cellphones. Does RF energy have the ability to do bad things? Sure. Two-way radios in blasting areas come to mind although I've never quite understood how that is a problem. I myself have seen what a walkie-talkie can do to a computer center's halon fire system.
But, IMHO, people who are bitching about RF energy are bitching about the wrong thing. The simple fact that the power company can now bill you based on WHEN you use energy as opposed to how much you use has huge implications. To appreciate these, one needs to understand that electricity is not a free market. Gasoline prices fluctuate during the week in order for the seller to charge more during higher periods of consumption. But, if you don't like the price one station is charging, you can go to another one and get a better price. Free market. (Okay, free-er market). But with electricity, you have no choice. You must buy it from the same source. Your only defense are utility commissions who must approve of any rate increases. Politics aside, what smart meters and non-quantity-based billing does is allow the power company to make more money without having to get approval for a rate increase. All they have to do is say "Oh, well, the average rate is X cents per kilowatt, the average rate being computed over the whole day. They know full well that there are peaks and valleys in usage throughout the day so they charge very little in the middle of the night and a huge amount during the day. Yes, you can make the argument that the power companies need to spend more money on fuel to ramp up output but A) that's only true for fossil-fuels and B) this isn't their first time at the rodeo so they should be really good at prediction by now. The solution to these issues is to revise utility commission rules to say that they can only bill you for total kilowatts consumed.
As to privacy issues, the data could be used against you. Say you go out and commit a crime. The prosecution could say "The defendant wasn't home at the time of the crime because his electricity usage was low during the time the crime was committed and high before and after." So, the solution is to pass a law that states that such data cannot be used as evidence in criminal or civil proceedings. A clever criminal could rig up devices on timers to eliminate such obvious changes in usage though.
YouTube is filled with proof that people simply don't care about personal safety or legality :)
There are also videos of people taking chainsaws to utility poles. Or if you prefer, buckshot :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I can see that you still embrace the philosophy of "I'm an American, so it's my right to consume whatever I want when I want, as long as I pay for it." I totally understand that, having lived my entire life immersed in it. Neither you nor I have ever lived in through a time of rationing, when there simply wasn't enough meat/butter/eggs/bread to go around. We don't know what austerity is, at least not first-hand.
But the energy system in this country is very near its physical limits, and there will come a point at which we can no longer build or dig our way out of the problem. Maybe not in the next decade or two, but probably not much further out than that. There simply won't be enough fuel, production capacity, or transmission capacity. And then the period of plenty you and I have grown up in will come to an end.
Picture a chart of electricity use over a 24 hour day, with a hump in the middle for air conditioning, a long slope for evening lighting, and a dip at the ends for night. Picture a horizontal line drawn over the top, with the tip of the hump poking through - that line represents conventional generation capacity, and electricity generated above that line is peak power. Now, picture a second horizontal line near the top of the hump, and that represents the maximum generation capacity. The smart grid enables us a way to carve off the hump of the peak, and distribute that electricity consumption to fill in the the gaps below the line. Better, it lets us fine tune the system - the closer we get to that upper finite bound, the higher the rates can be set to deter usage.
For that matter, it can theoretically support rationing to make sure some amount of the electricity is available to everyone at an affordable rate. We know that during heat waves, people who cannot afford to pay for air conditioning die. In the best interests of society as a whole, this might be an absolute requirement. But that's the start of austerity.
The smart grid is a tool that can help us delay the onset of austerity. We can better share the resources that exist with more people. Voluntarily, at least for a while.
As long as I pay my bill each month I want to be able to use whatever I want when I want without worrying about peak premiums. I certainly do not want my appliances or devices deciding to turn themselves off based on info they get from my meter! It is the middle of a hot summer afternoon and I am in my room playing RIFT. I have the AC on and I am in the middle of a raid with my guild. All of a sudden my AC turns off and my computer shuts down?! No fucking thank you!
You seem to think that the grid will magically shut you down automatically. It won't. For now, it's all voluntary, driven by economics. Don't want your PC to power down? Don't plug it into a smart outlet. But when it comes time to pay the bill, you might have to make some hard choices: is playing RIFT worth $20/hr in electric? Maybe you'd rather have a UPS that only charges at night, and play off a battery during the day. Again, your choice.
This is the root of what has to change, in the minds of 300 million Americans. It's not going to be easy.
John
If you are in a condo high-rise or an apartment block with many meters mounted side-by-side, the additive effect of these dozen or even half dozen meters is significant enough to be leary of being near them. A single meter or two, is probably no worse than a wireless router signal level and somewhat less than your cellphone.
Yes, in quantities, they are dangerous, in singles or doubles, I would not loose sleep over it.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
So when you posted your original comment regarding safety, you didn't ask a question in a way that distinguished yourself from the anti-science crowd - instead, you used the term "the jury's still out", which sounds exactly like their statements regarding anything they are trying to appear neutral or thoughtful on, yet are still trying to keep a controversy brewing. And I think that's why some people were unkind in their responses to you.
The irony of those responses is, that by essentially claiming "all RF is safe," even though it is a well-known fact that certain frequencies are indeed unsafe, those people are unwittingly giving the "wifi sickness" crowd more ammunition, by indicating that they (my respondents) themselves do not, in fact, understand the nature of RF.
It also indicates a general lack of reading comprehension ability (i.e., giving meaning to my words I did not intend them to have), but that's a topic for another day.
Politics aside, no anti-science viewpoint is ever looked upon kindly by most slashdotters.
A more accurate way to phrase that sentence would have been "Politics aside, no viewpoint that is perceived as anti-scientific is ever looked upon kindly."
Just look at the number of decidedly unscientific statements of "All RF is safe" on this thread that have been modded either Informative or Insightful, despite the fact it is, to anyone who actually knows thing 1 about RF, a false statement to make (whereas the one guy who points out that the public is not fully aware of the amounts and types of RF emissions gets modded Troll).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
an instrument of driving real change
Turn into:
they can just raise the rates
My faith in the power companies to keep the costs low, when they have the ability to simply bump it up, oh so slightly, oh so temporarily, is minimal. It's like how I prefer a mortgage with a fixed rate rather than one that can change willy-nilly. Even if there are good companies out there that will do their best to do right by the customer, bad companies who abuse it will make a mint and buy out the good guys. *cough*Enron*cough*.
And remember, they HAVE a real-time up-to-the-minute picture of generation and load. They sure as shit know what they're generating, they know what the load is, and they know WHERE over WHAT LINES this is all happening. But residential blocks are all lumped together past the substation. I don't see the need to give the power companies a finer level of awareness that creeps into my home. Not if it costs money. Not if there are privacy issues.
If you really want some sort of smart device that turns itself off when the power company sets their arbitrary price, publish it to a webpage, and my toaster will go look.
that there is a set or predicted period of time that is "peak" and "non-peak"
Oh, right, Also, YES there IS. It's called DAYTIME. Jesus christ dude, power companies have noticed this freaking trend. It might vary slightly region to region, but power is consumption peaks during the DAY. But sure, power generation comes in a lot of flavors. Nukey plants are good for baseline generation, but they hate to change. Coal plants take half and hour to to ramp up. Hydro is instant and cheap but you can't just summon more rain. Gas turbines and gasoline generators are quick but expensive. And it all depends on what is where. You lose a lot in transmission.
Like any statement with an absolute, "all RF is safe" is so overly broad as to be obviously false. But there is an envelope of "clearly safe", an outer envelope of "dangerously harmful", and an area in between. It can be definitively stated that "all RF generated by solid state transmitters that are below ultraviolet frequencies and below one watt fall into the 'clearly safe' envelope". And all consumer electronics either fall into that classification, or are engineered to safely contain it.
Ionizing radiation, such as gamma radiation or X-rays, is intentionally produced by accelerating electrons emitted by a cathode in a vacuum and having them strike a high voltage metallic anode target, which emits the radiation. Any vacuum tube can emit ionizing radiation, but the penetrating power of the radiation is directly related to the input voltage. The higher the voltage, the higher the penetration strength of the radiation. Purpose built X-ray tubes generally take 30kV or more to produce X-rays with enough power to be of practical value. Old color TV CRT tubes were known to emit a small amount of ionizing radiation (they operated at 15kV or more), so back in the 1960s the FDA mandated the output be limited to 0.005 Roentgens per hour or less. *
Since solid state amplifiers, such as are found in all modern electronic RF devices like phones, routers, and smart meters, do not use vacuum tube technology, they can not produce incidental ionizing radiation. Since they emit at lower frequencies than are harmful, they do not produce intentional ionizing radiation, either. Also keep in mind that in a high power radio transmitter, the ionizing radiation is emitted by the vacuum tubes, not the antenna. What comes out of the antenna is always non-ionizing.
Non-ionizing RF radiation can indeed be biologically harmful due to thermal effects, but that takes a certain amount of power at a given frequency. We are all familiar with the microwave oven, which is a (non-ionizing) transmitter in the 2.2 GHz band, and is obviously capable of roasting flesh. Wi-Fi transmitters also operate at microwave frequencies, very close to the frequency used by the ovens, and they can also excite water molecules the same way. However it's virtually the same as the difference between a flashlight bulb glowing red versus a stove element glowing red: one emits enough power to harm a lot of your skin at a distance of several inches if exposed for long enough, and one emits enough power to harm a tiny patch of skin only if the glass bulb is broken and the fiery element is applied directly to your finger.
Wi-Fi (and smart meters and cell phones) emit less than 1 watt, while microwave ovens emit hundreds of watts. I don't know exactly where the line is, as it's the subject of the debate, but it's well above 1 watt.
The controversy that is being stirred up is over the potential non-thermal biological effects of RF. There are plenty of theories (and most are theories that are not backed up by any actual studies), but they seem to have support coming only from the "crackpot" groups. There is no preponderance of scientifically valid studies showing any such harmful effects.
Finally, remember the inverse square law. As distance increases, power decreases by the square of the distance. It applies to RF just like it applies to the example of the stove and flashlight bulb above. Unless you're wearing a smart meter for a hat, the amount of power you can receive is much smaller than what you could possibly get from a cell phone - and cell phones, which have been at the center of the "brain cancer controversy", as well as the center of the RF crackpot groups, have still never been shown to cause damage via RF. The only damage they have been proven to cause is through secondary effects: distracted driving accidents, injury due to having a cell phone thrown at your face, heart attacks over bad news, batteries bursting into flame, etc.
* Yes, there was a lot of concern over color TV radiation then, and the modern RF
John
Any vacuum tube can emit ionizing radiation...
So... does that mean my old Marshall tube amp could be spitting out dangerous forms of RF?
...
That's...
That's kind of awesome, dude.
Non-ionizing RF radiation can indeed be biologically harmful due to thermal effects, but that takes a certain amount of power at a given frequency. We are all familiar with the microwave oven... Wi-Fi transmitters also operate at microwave frequencies, very close to the frequency used by the ovens, and they can also excite water molecules the same way... Wi-Fi (and smart meters and cell phones) emit less than 1 watt, while microwave ovens emit hundreds of watts.
So, *theoretically* a wifi antennae could cause damage to lifeforms, but only if cranked up to a ridiculous amount of voltage? I see a very poorly thought out experiment in my near future...
Radiation isn't a boolean:
Truth time: I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read that. Good show, man, good show.
A friend of mine once worked in a nuclear power plant, and he tells a story of long ago, when during some maintenance they had a "problem". As you might imagine, nuclear plant mechanics are in short supply, because they can only be exposed to so much radiation before their annual limits are used up. They needed to get a number of tools and parts to a hot spot where they had to make the repairs. So they had different people from the plant take turns hauling parts to the repair area. My friend was an office worker, but as he wasn't near his limit they asked him to push a couple carts full of tools to the zone and then retreat. The mechanics were lined up, each one taking a carefully rehearsed task, such as lifting a part into place and turning a wrench for a total of 60 seconds, and then retreating. They burned through a large number of employees recovering from that problem.
I must say, if I were your friend I would have thought it pretty cool to get the chance to help out. Sounds rather awesome.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Lot of words there, and not a lot to respond to, but I'm enjoying our conversation and did have a few points of interest I wanted to mention:
As am I. :-)
Any vacuum tube can emit ionizing radiation...
So... does that mean my old Marshall tube amp could be spitting out dangerous forms of RF? ...
That's...
That's kind of awesome, dude.
Throw a Tesla coil in there to up the voltage, crank it to 11, and shred. Although I have to believe a Geiger counter would make the world's worst metronome.
So, *theoretically* a wifi antennae could cause damage to lifeforms, but only if cranked up to a ridiculous amount of voltage? I see a very poorly thought out experiment in my near future...
Ridiculous power, not ridiculous voltage. And then, it could only cause thermal burns. Probably not as interesting as it sounds. Hmmm... Unless you ran it through a tube powered linear RF amplifier...hmmm...
Radiation isn't a boolean:
Truth time: I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read that. Good show, man, good show.
Sorry, I meant to say that exposure is not a Boolean. If it was, it's always set to true due to background radiation sources, which is hardly a useful measure. Either that, or if you measure it too quickly it's randomly true, kind of like asking an 8-year-old kid if your turn signals are blinking, and he says "no...yes...no...yes...no..."
I must say, if I were your friend I would have thought it pretty cool to get the chance to help out. Sounds rather awesome.
Yeah, I thought it was a really cool story, too.
John