BC Hydro has warned tens of thousands of holdouts from its smart meter installation program they have until Dec. 1 to accept the company’s terms. If they don’t, they’ll be left with their analogue meters and an extra $35 a month charge.
A smart meter attached to the home is a two-way transmission device that connects to larger “smart grid.” There are smart grid initiatives underway in almost every industrialized nation. B.C.’s initiative, like elsewhere, has proceeded without the messy taint of public input. One of former premier Gordon Campbell’s last acts in office was to take the smart meter program out of the oversight of the B.C. Utilities Commission, bypassing standard bureaucratic niceties for safeguarding public health and safety.
The primary official reason for the global rollout of this domestic electro-bling is to maximize the efficiency of energy distribution networks. But as they say in the auto advertisements, “your mileage may vary.”
In 2011, Connecticut state attorney general George Jepson urged state regulators to reject plans to replace older meters, after the pilot results of a smart meter program in his state “showed no beneficial impact on total energy usage,” according to Jepson. In Illinois, a report by the Electric Power Research Institute showed the overall amount of power use reduction by consumers was “statistically insignificant.” In a Crain’s Chicago Business, Susan Satter, senior assistant Illinois attorney general for public utilities, deemed the results “devastating” to the smart grid plans.
“The utilities have shown no evidence of billions of dollars of benefits to consumers from these new meters, but they have shown they know how to profit. I think the only question is: how dumb do they think we are?” asked Lisa Madigan, Illinois attorney general, in a 2011 article for the Chicago Tribune.
So if this isn’t about saving money — Obama threw billions at U.S. utilities to kickstart smart grid programs under his post-‘08 stimulus package — could it be about making a bundle? “It’s all about money. Were going to be charged for time of use one day, it’s coming,” warns former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm in Josh de Sol’s compelling documentary Take Back Your Power (which is viewable online).
Vander Zalm predicts rates will be gauged according to time of day, on top of a projected 26 per cent increase in rates in B.C. by 2016. Smart meter customers in Australia and elsewhere have already experienced increased rates from time of us, according to De Sol. This is the first concern of the holdouts.
It is hard to believe the smart grid has nothing to do with the much-ballyhooed promise of “big data”: the vast river of digital information created by consumer profiling. This is the holdouts’ second concern, that a fully operational grid will allow the tracking of every movement in the home. Consumer-level smart products will have a code that tells the grid where and when you shower, fire up your computer, turn on your coffee pot, etc.
Alarmism? In June 2013, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “California’s three big, investor-owned utilities had disclosed individual account information on thousands of their customers last year… Thanks to smart meters, that data can reveal when a customer goes to work, heads to bed or leaves on vacation…”
The holdouts’ third concern involves radiofrequency field exposure, and that’s a whole other can of worms. There are PhDs and MDs who claim there is no health risk, some who claim there is, and others who say more research is necessary. But I’m not qualified to judge the technical arguments over signal strength, transmission duration and distance from smart meters.
In any case, Hydro has offered no convincing business case for its $35 a month opt-out fee. It’s extortion by energy monopoly, compounded by B.C. Energy Minister Bill Bennett’s decree in October that the B.C. Utilities Commission cannot veto it.
So here’s a modest proposal to the provincial government. Tell BC Hydro to lay off with the bullying tactics. Let the smart meter holdouts stand as a control group for RF field exposure. A few years down the road there should be enough epidemiological “big data” from the two populations of emitted and nonemitted Hydro customers to lay these persistent claims to rest. Or not. You folks are all about open science, public safety, and representative democracy, right?
www.geoffolson.com
