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.
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
I have a hard time believing that it's entirely a scam. If you are going to buy a billion doses of vaccine, there is no "little pharma" or local sources equipped to deal with you. Big Pharma is the only choice, unless he wants to spend half the money building a factory and risk becoming Big Pharma himself.
I don't expect GSK to change their spots, and I'm not surprised that they're taking advantage of the situation, but at these scales the Gates Foundation has to deal with the giant - even when the giant is part of the original problem.
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.
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.
We're also quite suburban (but in what they now call a mixed neighborhood) and in a very modest house. We're across the street from a house that did have a "dealer problem" a decade ago; and the next block over has also had a couple of drug busts. It's everywhere.
But there's a huge difference between being "busted for having a growhouse" and "having ninjas bash down your door at 3:00 AM and plant fake evidence because they would be too embarrassed to admit they were wrong," which is the nonsense that started this thread way back when. It seems that everyone here thinks having grow lights means the latter, and that I'm somehow an exception escaping notice because of various made up reasons like "not enough power consumption".
The fact is I'm not tripping enough warning signs because I'm not growing dope. I have no idea if I've tripped any warning signs anywhere in this process, but I strongly suspect that the bright lights and high power draw have caught someone's notice. Cops do cruise the streets in my neighborhood, so it would be hard not to see my basement windows glowing like a lighthouse.
The important fact is that the cops in my city aren't being TV-type hard-asses because they are NOT asses, they're professional cops who do their jobs well; yet nobody around here wants to accept or believe that. They all seem to want to imagine pajama-clad ninjas bursting in at o-dark-30, and are inventing excuses why they haven't shown up yet and shot my dogs in some kind of horrible mistake. And that's just a wrong perception of good people.
It's not like we haven't seriously considered a greenhouse. We still talk about it. (Often.) But they're expensive to build, and very expensive to operate, even in the summer.
Our biggest problem is our zone 2b winters. A four season greenhouse sounds great, and they're wonderful little tropical retreats from winter, but we've had several friends lose their collections to frost due to various technical problems (loss of power, damaged panels, faulty thermostats, etc), and my wife simply doesn't trust that an unattended greenhouse will always stay warm enough. Inside our house we're much more aware of the environment, we have more dependable equipment, we have temperature alarms, and we have two independent options for heat in case of an emergency. Heating a greenhouse over the winter around here takes far more energy than lighting the basement in the summer. One couple we know needed a larger diameter gas line brought to their property to feed their 6,000,000 BTU greenhouse boiler. It cost so much to operate they've since blocked off 1/2 of their greenhouse, have sold off much of their collection, and are using a small garage furnace to keep the remainder warm.
So, since we're not commercial growers we won't invest in a four-season greenhouse. That still leaves room for an option like a non-permanent cheaper tent-style structure. An unheated structure would be good for only 3-4 months out of the year, from the date of last frost risk to the date of first frost risk, saving us no more than 1/3 of our annual lighting bill.
Without a controlled, sealed greenhouse environment to go to, it makes for several other problems. Environmental control isn't practical. We occasionally have nights that unexpectedly dip into the 40s, and for some of the tropical plants we have that causes bud blast. We also have frequent summer temperatures in the 90s, and occasionally 100s, far too hot for over half our collection. Keeping the temperature below sweltering in a greenhouse requires running a high power drag out fan for long hours. Outdoor humidity ranges all over the place, from 90% at night to 30% in the day. Keeping the humidity high enough in a greenhouse requires a system like a swamp cooler, which also takes a lot of power to run the electric fan and water pump. In our basement, we already have environmental cases for the warm temperature, bright light, and high humidity plants, while the basement atmosphere itself is fine for intermediate to cool growing plants, where we use humidity trays to keep them locally at about 50-60% RH all day and night. Lighting just those cases makes up about half our energy consumption. So that leaves the savings to only being able to shut off the floodlights, which together draw 290 W of the 800 W total.
(A couple years ago, in order to reduce our electric consumption, I replaced our 400W high pressure sodium lights with 145W LED floodlights. The LED floodlights are frightfully expensive, and quite a risky investment because the technology is completely unproven as nobody has seen these high power emitters actually last for the claimed 50,000 hour lifetimes. But I also was not happy with how much electricity we were drawing with the sodium lamps. I also was very concerned with the fire risk due to the heat being emitted. And should a light fixture fail, it's not an immediate emergency threat to the collection.)
Another problem growing outdoors is pests. Without a sealed greenhouse the plants would be exposed to everything that crawls and flies around here, from rodents to varmints, aphids to spider mites, ants, beetles, wasps, moths, butterflies, and even new kinds of fungi. It's impossible to predict in advance which plants might be attacked or destroyed by which of these pests, or how many of them we'd bring back inside in the fall.
We do put some of the plants outside in the summer, specifically as many as we can that will tolerate bright, hot conditions; and they get carefully inspected and sprayed before being brought back indoors. But that's not nearly enough of the collection to shut down the lighting systems inside.
So as much as I'd like to grow them all outdoors in a real greenhouse, that comes with more costs, and more risks.
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.
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.
How much further do I have to go to be suspected of being a grow house? Grow lights? Check. Utility bill 3x that of the neighborhood average? Check. Doesn't invite the neighbors in to see what he's growing? Check.
What you're saying makes no more sense than "since you have a basement capable of hiding a victim, if the cops suspect you of kidnapping, they're going to get a warrant and check your basement." Of course they are.
It seems that everyone on Slashdot expects every police department across the country to be filled with over-the-top Hollywood cops who bust down doors of guys "they just know" are bad. Seriously? The cops I know are far too busy doing their actual jobs than to risk their careers and freedom because they want to act out a part they saw on TV. Maybe it's just because I live in Flyover, MN that I don't have the same level of paranoia as folks do in NY, LA, or Miami.
Yes, and you can get raided for suspicion of CP or dealing drugs or cooking meth or downloading a copy of Linux from bittorrent without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. Does that mean you live your life in constant fear of a potential police raid? I certainly hope not, because that would be a sad and pathetic existence.
The GP post was saying something melodramatic like "if you have grow lights and raise orchids, the cops will beat down your door and plant dope on you because they don't want to look stupid." I have one confirmed data point that conflicts with his assumption, as well as the collective experiences of a 200 member orchid society that has existed for 50 years without having a single dog shot in the dead of night or any zootrophion hypodiscus confiscated by theatrically overzealous cops.
Paranoia is something you plant in your own mind. Nobody else can put it there for you.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I do grow orchids indoors as a hobby, and have several large grow lamps and fluorescent arrays that draw over 800 watt-hours for 17 hours per day (in the summer, anyway, they need shorter hours of daylight in the winter.) And there's no mistaking the glow emanating from the basement windows.
I've never had so much as a knock on the door from a city or police official or power company representative asking what I'm growing under all the lights.
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.
That doesn't take a smart meter at all. If your usage goes up by 1000 kWh/month (4 400W HPS lights, not uncommon for a basement grow room), they already have enough information to poke around.
A smart meter just keeps track of usage at certain rates and times. If you're running a grow house, they don't care if you have the lights on during cheap power or during expensive power. The electric company does, of course, because they're going to bill you more for the juice you use during peak time. The cops also don't need to know real-time what your usage is: anyone can have a transient period where they flip on all the lights, turn on the appliances, crank the AC, and draw a huge amount of current. It's only when you consistently start drawing 3 kW per hour for 20 hours per day for months on end that they'd notice. And they can just as easily get all that data from your current bill.
Serious answer: if they can't access the meter during a trip (common enough around here during snowstorms, or if there's a dog in the yard), they estimate usage based on the account's consumption history. If they are prevented from taking an actual reading from the meter for long enough, they would contact him and request him to allow them access to the meter. If he failed to cooperate, they would disconnect him at the pole and terminate his service - you grant them access to the meter when you sign up for service, after all.
The power company is not reading his meter, by the way. The power company is reading their meter which is located on his property. If he did threaten them, the sheriff would come out and have a chat with him while the electrician removed their property from his property.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the most important recovery method: if it's too hard to view, it's just the freakin' web - I go back to my search results and find the info on a different site. There are usually dozens of other sites willing to provide me the information without making me endure their JavaScript stupidity.
For the crazy amounts of power you're talking about (seven days worth of air conditioning, refrigeration, and life support systems!) you'd need dozens of deep cycle lead acid batteries filling your basement. You'd have to periodically maintain them (measuring and topping up their fluids) and you'd have to replace them as crystal growth over time would kill their storage capacity.
And plastic boxes filled with leaded sulfuric acid are obviously no hazard to your family, to firefighters, or any other visitor to your house.
A whole-house generator is a hell of a lot cheaper than the amount of battery storage you're talking about, and a buried tank of fuel is probably safer.
they would be difficult to find and extremely expensive to fix. I'm not sure that I see underground cabling to be that much of an advantage.
Look up Time Domain Reflectometry. With it, an engineer can find a line break or insulation leakage to within a few centimeters on a kilometers-long stretch of wire. Underground damage is just not all that hard to find anymore. As far as expense, maintenance of overhead wires is surprisingly high. They have to continually trim trees to keep them away, they have to continually fix broken wires due to storms or cars and trucks accidentally ramming poles, and the risks to passersby from downed wires is a huge liability, with millions of dollars of lawsuits per death on the line. Compare those to the costs of burying a cable that basically will just sit there for years on end, with generally no significant mechanical stresses on it to cause failures.
The only drawback is making the investment to bury the wires. The payback is measured in decades, not months like the Chief Financial Officers want to see. They'd rather spend money on investments with quick profits.
The amount of buried utilities in the U.S. largely depends on the municipality and the utilities in question. Some cities are 80% or more served by buried cables. I remember a push back in the 1970s for one of our local providers to start replacing their poles with trenches, but that ended when they realized that there was no profit incentive in the equation. Burying wires for the sake of not seeing them isn't a revenue generator, and the cities weren't willing to collect extra tax money to bury their wires. Some cities came to an agreement with their electric companies to bury the lines during maintenance work, with statements of 15 year goals of removing all power lines, but those timelines were extended as the costs could never be justified.
These more recent years of storms, however, are certainly getting their attention. As they figure increasing amounts of storm damage into their models, the breakeven point for buried cables gets closer and closer.
Funny, I often wonder how so many people can view with the WWW without NoScript installed! Zooming up fake windows, continually scrolling sidebars, attack ads, "do you want to chat with a representative online" boxes, it seems like there are usually about three things to dismiss before even uncovering most content.
However, I'd certainly agree that NoScript is not for the uninitiated. It doesn't pass the mom test, or even the wife test. Most people just want things to work, and are willing to put up with whatever crap they're served in order to get it. I'm willing to view the static content, and if there's something deeper to explore, I understand up front that I might have to whitelist a few things to get it to work. Note that you can configure NoScript to automatically permit scripts originating from "base 2nd level domains" (i.e. allow everything from *.foobar.com when you're on www.foobar.com), which generally enables local content to work just fine, while still preventing XSS nonsense. The only place where I commonly run into trouble is with video content, as it's generally hosted somewhere else like Vimeo or YouTube, and with third party SSO providers like Yahoo. In all, over many years of browsing I've added some margin of trust for about a hundred sites which seem to have taken care of most of those issues.
You're a couple posts behind staving off the knee jerks. However, the safety of NoScript isn't the primary reason I run it. It's the crap that third party scripts "add to browsing experience" that I find useless at best; distracting in most cases of advertising; and tracking sites that are actively harmful to my privacy as well as to the accuracy of the web in general because their results are used by marketers to manipulate search engine results via their SEO activities.
And I would argue against your assertion that JavaScript is secure. The problem is that it's so complex, and that it interacts in so many different ways with browsers, that the many implementers have unintentionally created a seemingly limitless supply of security holes.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Information like this will likely prove to be very informative.
And bananas will likely prove to taste very much like bananas, and books will likely prove to contain words.
I think you were trying to make a point, but it really got lost in your posting.
I have a hard time believing that it's entirely a scam. If you are going to buy a billion doses of vaccine, there is no "little pharma" or local sources equipped to deal with you. Big Pharma is the only choice, unless he wants to spend half the money building a factory and risk becoming Big Pharma himself.
I don't expect GSK to change their spots, and I'm not surprised that they're taking advantage of the situation, but at these scales the Gates Foundation has to deal with the giant - even when the giant is part of the original problem.
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.
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.
We're also quite suburban (but in what they now call a mixed neighborhood) and in a very modest house. We're across the street from a house that did have a "dealer problem" a decade ago; and the next block over has also had a couple of drug busts. It's everywhere.
But there's a huge difference between being "busted for having a growhouse" and "having ninjas bash down your door at 3:00 AM and plant fake evidence because they would be too embarrassed to admit they were wrong," which is the nonsense that started this thread way back when. It seems that everyone here thinks having grow lights means the latter, and that I'm somehow an exception escaping notice because of various made up reasons like "not enough power consumption".
The fact is I'm not tripping enough warning signs because I'm not growing dope. I have no idea if I've tripped any warning signs anywhere in this process, but I strongly suspect that the bright lights and high power draw have caught someone's notice. Cops do cruise the streets in my neighborhood, so it would be hard not to see my basement windows glowing like a lighthouse.
The important fact is that the cops in my city aren't being TV-type hard-asses because they are NOT asses, they're professional cops who do their jobs well; yet nobody around here wants to accept or believe that. They all seem to want to imagine pajama-clad ninjas bursting in at o-dark-30, and are inventing excuses why they haven't shown up yet and shot my dogs in some kind of horrible mistake. And that's just a wrong perception of good people.
It's not like we haven't seriously considered a greenhouse. We still talk about it. (Often.) But they're expensive to build, and very expensive to operate, even in the summer.
Our biggest problem is our zone 2b winters. A four season greenhouse sounds great, and they're wonderful little tropical retreats from winter, but we've had several friends lose their collections to frost due to various technical problems (loss of power, damaged panels, faulty thermostats, etc), and my wife simply doesn't trust that an unattended greenhouse will always stay warm enough. Inside our house we're much more aware of the environment, we have more dependable equipment, we have temperature alarms, and we have two independent options for heat in case of an emergency. Heating a greenhouse over the winter around here takes far more energy than lighting the basement in the summer. One couple we know needed a larger diameter gas line brought to their property to feed their 6,000,000 BTU greenhouse boiler. It cost so much to operate they've since blocked off 1/2 of their greenhouse, have sold off much of their collection, and are using a small garage furnace to keep the remainder warm.
So, since we're not commercial growers we won't invest in a four-season greenhouse. That still leaves room for an option like a non-permanent cheaper tent-style structure. An unheated structure would be good for only 3-4 months out of the year, from the date of last frost risk to the date of first frost risk, saving us no more than 1/3 of our annual lighting bill.
Without a controlled, sealed greenhouse environment to go to, it makes for several other problems. Environmental control isn't practical. We occasionally have nights that unexpectedly dip into the 40s, and for some of the tropical plants we have that causes bud blast. We also have frequent summer temperatures in the 90s, and occasionally 100s, far too hot for over half our collection. Keeping the temperature below sweltering in a greenhouse requires running a high power drag out fan for long hours. Outdoor humidity ranges all over the place, from 90% at night to 30% in the day. Keeping the humidity high enough in a greenhouse requires a system like a swamp cooler, which also takes a lot of power to run the electric fan and water pump. In our basement, we already have environmental cases for the warm temperature, bright light, and high humidity plants, while the basement atmosphere itself is fine for intermediate to cool growing plants, where we use humidity trays to keep them locally at about 50-60% RH all day and night. Lighting just those cases makes up about half our energy consumption. So that leaves the savings to only being able to shut off the floodlights, which together draw 290 W of the 800 W total.
(A couple years ago, in order to reduce our electric consumption, I replaced our 400W high pressure sodium lights with 145W LED floodlights. The LED floodlights are frightfully expensive, and quite a risky investment because the technology is completely unproven as nobody has seen these high power emitters actually last for the claimed 50,000 hour lifetimes. But I also was not happy with how much electricity we were drawing with the sodium lamps. I also was very concerned with the fire risk due to the heat being emitted. And should a light fixture fail, it's not an immediate emergency threat to the collection.)
Another problem growing outdoors is pests. Without a sealed greenhouse the plants would be exposed to everything that crawls and flies around here, from rodents to varmints, aphids to spider mites, ants, beetles, wasps, moths, butterflies, and even new kinds of fungi. It's impossible to predict in advance which plants might be attacked or destroyed by which of these pests, or how many of them we'd bring back inside in the fall.
We do put some of the plants outside in the summer, specifically as many as we can that will tolerate bright, hot conditions; and they get carefully inspected and sprayed before being brought back indoors. But that's not nearly enough of the collection to shut down the lighting systems inside.
So as much as I'd like to grow them all outdoors in a real greenhouse, that comes with more costs, and more risks.
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.
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.
How much further do I have to go to be suspected of being a grow house? Grow lights? Check. Utility bill 3x that of the neighborhood average? Check. Doesn't invite the neighbors in to see what he's growing? Check.
What you're saying makes no more sense than "since you have a basement capable of hiding a victim, if the cops suspect you of kidnapping, they're going to get a warrant and check your basement." Of course they are.
It seems that everyone on Slashdot expects every police department across the country to be filled with over-the-top Hollywood cops who bust down doors of guys "they just know" are bad. Seriously? The cops I know are far too busy doing their actual jobs than to risk their careers and freedom because they want to act out a part they saw on TV. Maybe it's just because I live in Flyover, MN that I don't have the same level of paranoia as folks do in NY, LA, or Miami.
Yes, and you can get raided for suspicion of CP or dealing drugs or cooking meth or downloading a copy of Linux from bittorrent without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. Does that mean you live your life in constant fear of a potential police raid? I certainly hope not, because that would be a sad and pathetic existence.
The GP post was saying something melodramatic like "if you have grow lights and raise orchids, the cops will beat down your door and plant dope on you because they don't want to look stupid." I have one confirmed data point that conflicts with his assumption, as well as the collective experiences of a 200 member orchid society that has existed for 50 years without having a single dog shot in the dead of night or any zootrophion hypodiscus confiscated by theatrically overzealous cops.
Paranoia is something you plant in your own mind. Nobody else can put it there for you.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I do grow orchids indoors as a hobby, and have several large grow lamps and fluorescent arrays that draw over 800 watt-hours for 17 hours per day (in the summer, anyway, they need shorter hours of daylight in the winter.) And there's no mistaking the glow emanating from the basement windows.
I've never had so much as a knock on the door from a city or police official or power company representative asking what I'm growing under all the lights.
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.
That doesn't take a smart meter at all. If your usage goes up by 1000 kWh/month (4 400W HPS lights, not uncommon for a basement grow room), they already have enough information to poke around.
A smart meter just keeps track of usage at certain rates and times. If you're running a grow house, they don't care if you have the lights on during cheap power or during expensive power. The electric company does, of course, because they're going to bill you more for the juice you use during peak time. The cops also don't need to know real-time what your usage is: anyone can have a transient period where they flip on all the lights, turn on the appliances, crank the AC, and draw a huge amount of current. It's only when you consistently start drawing 3 kW per hour for 20 hours per day for months on end that they'd notice. And they can just as easily get all that data from your current bill.
Serious answer: if they can't access the meter during a trip (common enough around here during snowstorms, or if there's a dog in the yard), they estimate usage based on the account's consumption history. If they are prevented from taking an actual reading from the meter for long enough, they would contact him and request him to allow them access to the meter. If he failed to cooperate, they would disconnect him at the pole and terminate his service - you grant them access to the meter when you sign up for service, after all.
The power company is not reading his meter, by the way. The power company is reading their meter which is located on his property. If he did threaten them, the sheriff would come out and have a chat with him while the electrician removed their property from his property.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the most important recovery method: if it's too hard to view, it's just the freakin' web - I go back to my search results and find the info on a different site. There are usually dozens of other sites willing to provide me the information without making me endure their JavaScript stupidity.
For the crazy amounts of power you're talking about (seven days worth of air conditioning, refrigeration, and life support systems!) you'd need dozens of deep cycle lead acid batteries filling your basement. You'd have to periodically maintain them (measuring and topping up their fluids) and you'd have to replace them as crystal growth over time would kill their storage capacity.
And plastic boxes filled with leaded sulfuric acid are obviously no hazard to your family, to firefighters, or any other visitor to your house.
A whole-house generator is a hell of a lot cheaper than the amount of battery storage you're talking about, and a buried tank of fuel is probably safer.
they would be difficult to find and extremely expensive to fix. I'm not sure that I see underground cabling to be that much of an advantage.
Look up Time Domain Reflectometry. With it, an engineer can find a line break or insulation leakage to within a few centimeters on a kilometers-long stretch of wire. Underground damage is just not all that hard to find anymore. As far as expense, maintenance of overhead wires is surprisingly high. They have to continually trim trees to keep them away, they have to continually fix broken wires due to storms or cars and trucks accidentally ramming poles, and the risks to passersby from downed wires is a huge liability, with millions of dollars of lawsuits per death on the line. Compare those to the costs of burying a cable that basically will just sit there for years on end, with generally no significant mechanical stresses on it to cause failures.
The only drawback is making the investment to bury the wires. The payback is measured in decades, not months like the Chief Financial Officers want to see. They'd rather spend money on investments with quick profits.
The amount of buried utilities in the U.S. largely depends on the municipality and the utilities in question. Some cities are 80% or more served by buried cables. I remember a push back in the 1970s for one of our local providers to start replacing their poles with trenches, but that ended when they realized that there was no profit incentive in the equation. Burying wires for the sake of not seeing them isn't a revenue generator, and the cities weren't willing to collect extra tax money to bury their wires. Some cities came to an agreement with their electric companies to bury the lines during maintenance work, with statements of 15 year goals of removing all power lines, but those timelines were extended as the costs could never be justified.
These more recent years of storms, however, are certainly getting their attention. As they figure increasing amounts of storm damage into their models, the breakeven point for buried cables gets closer and closer.
Funny, I often wonder how so many people can view with the WWW without NoScript installed! Zooming up fake windows, continually scrolling sidebars, attack ads, "do you want to chat with a representative online" boxes, it seems like there are usually about three things to dismiss before even uncovering most content.
However, I'd certainly agree that NoScript is not for the uninitiated. It doesn't pass the mom test, or even the wife test. Most people just want things to work, and are willing to put up with whatever crap they're served in order to get it. I'm willing to view the static content, and if there's something deeper to explore, I understand up front that I might have to whitelist a few things to get it to work. Note that you can configure NoScript to automatically permit scripts originating from "base 2nd level domains" (i.e. allow everything from *.foobar.com when you're on www.foobar.com), which generally enables local content to work just fine, while still preventing XSS nonsense. The only place where I commonly run into trouble is with video content, as it's generally hosted somewhere else like Vimeo or YouTube, and with third party SSO providers like Yahoo. In all, over many years of browsing I've added some margin of trust for about a hundred sites which seem to have taken care of most of those issues.
You're a couple posts behind staving off the knee jerks. However, the safety of NoScript isn't the primary reason I run it. It's the crap that third party scripts "add to browsing experience" that I find useless at best; distracting in most cases of advertising; and tracking sites that are actively harmful to my privacy as well as to the accuracy of the web in general because their results are used by marketers to manipulate search engine results via their SEO activities.
And I would argue against your assertion that JavaScript is secure. The problem is that it's so complex, and that it interacts in so many different ways with browsers, that the many implementers have unintentionally created a seemingly limitless supply of security holes.