California County Bans SmartMeter Installations 494
kiwimate writes "Marin County in California has passed an ordinance (PDF) banning the installation of smart meters in unincorporated Marin. Among the reasons given are privacy concerns associated with measuring energy usage data moment by moment and the potential for adverse impact on emergency communication systems used by first responders and amateur radio operators. The ordinance also comments that 'the SmartMeters program ... could well actually increase total electricity consumption and therefore the carbon footprint,' citing 'some engineers and energy conservation experts.'"
The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters."
Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could be the real reason for those privacy concerns, and more power to them.
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...and more power to them.
Very clever. Quite a few places are considering similar bans, for different reasons. One of the more prevalent issues is union labor pushing to keep meter-readers in business.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Funny)
You got a problem with that?
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Are you being funny?
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:4, Funny)
How many Teamsters does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. You got a problem with that?
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Only two? Jeeze, I think when I heard that joke, it was like seven, with all the jobs listed out, and finally ending with the 'you got a problem with that?' line.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who writes analysis code for the readings collected by smart meters, do you know how easy it is to isolate unusual activity by studying the averages versus actuals on a system like this and then send a few men out to do an inspection in a specific area versus the fleet of vehicles needed (carbon footprint) to read all those meters?
And I'm not going to go into the privacy concerns cos smart meters only relay usage, they know nothing about their installed locations.
I think this is about pot myself.
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And if my electricity costs were lower, I could afford to hire someone to clean my house. Multiply that by hundreds of households per meter reader, and efficiency gains in our society result in huge job creation.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Interesting)
But in the experience of the past few decades, greater efficiency and profit has not led to cost savings for consumers.
At some point, when you put enough people out of work, you no longer have consumers who can afford your product. Henry Ford figured that out, but the current perked and golden-parachuted captains of industry seem to have forgotten it. But they figure that if American consumers can no longer afford their products, then there are billions of Chinese and Indians who can, especially if they're given sufficient credit. And long before those markets are played out they'll have earned half a billion dollars so why give a fuck?
See, short-term thinking is standard in business today. You worry about your quarterly profits, your stock price and that's it. Very few companies look five or ten years down the road, because the CEOs are only worried about their bonuses and the Boards of Directors are all golf buddies of the CEO and they're all going continue to get rich no matter what happens to the company.
How common is it to hear of a CEO being let go after driving a company into the dirt and walking away with a fat severance package that was approved by the board? I forget his name, but there was a flabbergasting story a few years ago about the CEO of a major home improvement chain who lost fifty percent of the company's capitalization and left with an eight-figure going away package.
Corporate consolidation guarantees that the people at the top of corporations are not part of the communities in which they do business. This has created a disconnect that has had disastrous effect.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually there are generally not many low-skilled jobs out there.. they slowly dissappear.
There was a research project in the 90's called "The midwest Job Gap". It's basic conclusion was there were 2-4 low-skill workers (for various reasons, these people aren't going to learn their way up to high skill jobs) for every 1 low skill job.
Here's an old reference to it: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-4404804.html [highbeam.com]
The premise that there is enough work to go around for low skill workers is generally false.
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Actually there are generally not many low-skilled jobs out there.. they slowly dissappear.
Well, depends on the jurisdiction, but in general there are often many low-skilled jobs out there. What there are not, however, are reasonably-well-paying low-skilled jobs.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:4, Funny)
He just provided a source saying that there aren't many low skilled jobs around. No qualification. Is your assertion supposed to be true because you made the font bold?
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:4, Insightful)
I too have a big problem with unions Luddites holding back progress just to keep another dues payer in a pointless job filling the union coffers with additional bribe money.
Radiation fear mongers are the same ones that want to shut down your wifi. The meter is on the outside of the house, any radiation they produce is no more than your neighbors wifi, which is on 24/7.
Privacy concerns are probably the only real basis for objection because anything broadcasting a signal can probably be intercepted, or demanded from the power company, with or without a subpoena, where as a cop sneaking on to your property daily to read your meter is too costly and would require a warrant.
Other than police trying to sniff out those running a grow-op in their basement, its not too clear to me why anyone would want this information.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Radiation fear mongers are the same ones that want to shut down your wifi. The meter is on the outside of the house, any radiation they produce is no more than your neighbors wifi, which is on 24/7.
Was in commercial radio for about 20 years...part of that time in the engineering end and am also a Ham Radio operator. Spooking people with stories of a big source WiFi radiation outside their home is as rooted in truth as telling kids they'll grow hair in their palms or go blind from masturbation.
I used to accompany our head engineer to the transmitter on a mountain top location. The transmitter was running at 100,000 W...hence away from every/anybody. The first time I ever visited the site...I walked into the room which had the lights on what looked like a dimmer turned 1/2 way up...but the switch was in the "off" position. Turned on the lights to full power. Then we used the "Jesus Pole" after this to ground off any stray current...we cleaned the cabinet out and tweaked the final.
As for Ham Radio use...I put any antenna up as high/far away from anyone to keep RF away from where people are to keep them from bitching when I transmit and their TV goes crazy.
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I spoze that's easier than cleaning the harmonics out of your tower and keeping your transmissions out of the TV bands
The problem is that many of these harmonics are created not in the transmitter but in your antenna and your receiver - because not every manufacturer does a good job. Nothing that he transmits can fix that.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Insightful)
[citation needed]
The fact that people with smart meters continue to get TV, FM Radio, short wave, police and ambulance radios, and garage doors open just fine, with no interference and no problems would SEEM TO SUGGEST you have no clue about what you are speaking.
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I track down RF problems, and half the time they turn out to be a smart meter, or an ethernet-over-power adaptor.
When my next door neighbours got a smart meter, nothing RF-y worked any more. Worst hit was the HF part of the spectrum, so that was one of my hobbies (amateur radio) knackered. However, all was not lost, because I can just use a different band, right? So I concentrated my attention on 13cm, where I can legally crank out a few hundred watts and obliterate the whole wifi spectrum - thus deprivi
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Sounds bogus.
Interference with licensed RF would have given you the right to demand it be shut down.
As a ham you should have known this.
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Many smart meters use similar technology to BPL for their communication, so it's no surprise at all they can cause interference to HF. The FCC has shown themselves to be so disinterested in its effects on amateur radio that the ARRL had to sue them over it, so while you are technically correct the practical situation is different.
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Yeah, but just try getting Ofcom to stir from their sleepy comfort for anything that doesn't make them money.
He's a LIMEY! Get him!
No interference (Score:3)
And, being a ham operator, I would have noticed by now if the Smart Meter that was installed at my house was causing any interference, and it's not.
Now, the bills every month for 8888 kWh are starting to look a little suspicious....
Smart meters != PLC (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds like you're mixing up two technologies -- wireless smart meters [wikipedia.org] and power line communication [wikipedia.org]. The two are orthogonal and independent.
Because of the expense, very few smart meter systems use PLC (usually known as Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, in the US). It's expensive to have to bypass all the transformers and other kit in the power grid that wasn't designed to pass communications in the first place, which is fortunate because PLC is nasty to the RF environment -- all those unshielded, long, high, conductors radiate. However, the great majority of smart meter systems with which I am familiar use either licensed channels in the UHF or 800/900 MHz land mobile bands, or use the unlicensed 868/900 or 2400 MHz ISM bands, and they're no more likely to cause interference than any other user of the spectrum.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing jobs for people as a "wasteful use of human resources" is one of the symptoms of why the rise of transnational corporations is destroying so many societies. Why is the corporate profit motive never questioned, but the motive to provide for one's family and oneself is discounted?
What do you say we don't start thinking in those terms until we've gotten to the point where everyone has sufficient food, shelter, clothing and education?
Why not? If a company is going to profit from operating within a society, why shouldn't it be expected to support that society? If a company registers a patent in the US, then places it in a subsidiary in Holland, then a subsidiary in Ireland, and then back to Holland, finally licensing it back to itself to the US subsidiary in order to avoid paying taxes in the country that it sells the product, why shouldn't it be "forced" to contribute to the well-being of the people who comprise that market?
I think we underestimate the danger of believing that profit without responsibility is OK. More than thirty percent of the wealth of the bottom 75% of Americans just evaporated from 2000 to 2008 during a time when the largest corporations profits grew. Can you figure out where that trend heads?
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Seeing jobs for people as a "wasteful use of human resources" is one of the symptoms of why the rise of transnational corporations is destroying so many societies. Why is the corporate profit motive never questioned, but the motive to provide for one's family and oneself is discounted?
Wait, so now we have a duty to prop up businesses that don't have a profitable setup? How dare we fire the buggy whip makers just because new technology came along? Won't someone think of the workers? What? They got jobs putting engines together? We all know todays workers can never be trained to do a new job, how dare you take away their sole means of supporting themselves?
What do you say we don't start thinking in those terms until we've gotten to the point where everyone has sufficient food, shelter, clothing and education?
Good luck with that... it's been tried many different ways and has never been sustainable.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeing jobs for people as a "wasteful use of human resources" is one of the symptoms of why the rise of transnational corporations is destroying so many societies. Why is the corporate profit motive never questioned, but the motive to provide for one's family and oneself is discounted?
On Slashdot? Because we're well versed in the Broken Window Fallacy. Not so much when it comes to economics more generally, unfortunately.
Also you're begging the question.
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A company should not be forced to support hundreds of workers it doesn't need
Why not? If a company is going to profit from operating within a society, why shouldn't it be expected to support that society?
You apparently believe that absent "unnecessary workers", the company will generate more profit. That is, "if we force X more workers on the company, it'll soak up those profits and put them in our pocket".
The reality is that the company can react in three ways to increased efficiency of its workers:
a) retain the benefits as profit
b) decrease the costs of the product (or service)
c) increase the wages of the employees
The option generally taken is B, due to competition. If The Other Company reduces the pric
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Then if the company operates at a loss, should society support the company?
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Your Holiness -
"If a company is going to profit from operating within a society, why shouldn't it be expected to support that society?"
Milton Friedman often spoke about this fallacy. It is based on a misunderstanding of the free market.
You think that when you use your money to buy a loaf of bread, the breadmaker profits. But this is only half-correct. *You profit, too.*
The breadmaker values the two dollars that you have more than he values the loaf of bread that he has; that is why he is willing to trade.
Bu
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Informative)
Within the last 40 years, nearly all the gains in productivity have gone to the top 1%. The middle class has barely broken even. The poor have gotten poorer. I doubt the top 1% are actually responsible for those productivity gains, in fact I'm pretty sure the rest of us did the lion's share of the work. But we got shafted instead of getting rich, with a tiny minority harvesting all the fruits of our labors.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Insightful)
The middle class have more "things" to keep them happy, sure. But it generally requires two people working full time to have that home, car or 2, and all the comforts that we believe we need (cable tv, etc..). In 1950, it was 1 full time worker for that home, car, etc..
But I would guess that the post you replied to is mostly looking at income inequality.
Graph of income [lanekenworthy.net]
1970 until now, the middle class really hasn't had a pay increase, when adjusted by inflation. The middle has stayed middle, (or slightly gone below historic middle depending on how you view the data). The rich, on the other hand, have gotten progressively more rich in comparison.
Wealth really is concentrating at the top. Just because you have enough gadgets to keep you happy doesn't necessarily mean you are receiving a fair slice of societies pie.
It is pretty interesting looking at income inequality and economic depressions. Look how similar income distribution was right before the great depression and right before our current depression historic graph
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Informative)
You think the unions want to keep meter readers in business? It wouldn't be unprecedented, we still have fire-tenders on electric trains. But I'd like to see some evidence. There is a very, very strong push by business interests to smear unions going on right now.
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I think unions like the UAW have don't a remarkable enough job without the help of business interests.
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Yeah, because all the hardships facing the automobile makers were entirely the UAW's fault. It's not as if the managers were being just as stupid approving all those benefits based on highly overfly rosy outlooks of their future prospects. No, no, the only ones at fault are those ebil unions!!!
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Do you call 30,000 people showing up once a month to pick up a paycheck because the union forced the auto cos to keep them on payroll a hardship?
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The reason why they almost ran out of business was that they were relying too heavily on SUVs and trucks for profit and were trying to produce more vehicles than the market could bear at the price. Additionally, they were slow to recognize the interest in more fuel
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It's not about hardship for CEOs. It's about passing the buck on to the consumers who have to pay more for cars because union contracts dicatate employees cannot be laid off.
The auto market is fickle as we saw with the crash recently. Strangely, when people are worried about money they don't buy new cars.
I saw a fascinating documentary recently about Ford and what they did starting in 2006. They saw the waste, decided to kill Mercury and sell of ownership in other brands because "it's impossible to be ex
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Right. You just heard about the evils of the UAW from totally unbiased sources. No business interests push propaganda on YOU.
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So, you're familiar with where my information comes from all on your own? Maybe you should apply for that $1MM psychic challenge.
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So, you're familiar with where my information comes from all on your own? Maybe you should apply for that $1MM psychic challenge.
I never claimed I knew, but now that you mention it, where does it come from?
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:5, Informative)
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Sounds like you have a nice anecdote there. I'm sure your personal experience in this one instance can be applied to all unions, everywhere, for all time.
Here's another one: Three people flew from coast to coast to install a piece of equipment. The phone circuit wasn't working so we called in a ticket and the technician showed up to troubleshoot. He works on the problem for about 45 minutes and identifies that the jack was mis-wired (by another union member), then starts packing up to leave with the circuit still not working. When we asked him what he was doing, he said "I get half an hour to pick up my tools". It was 4:30PM. It took him about five minutes t
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Reminds me of that old joke:
What's the difference between a successful union and a successful parasite?
The parasite doesn't kill its host.
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Right. You just heard about the evils of the UAW from totally unbiased sources. No business interests push propaganda on YOU.
spun, you are a mindless troll, and I'll call you out on it every time I see your bullshit.
The UAW is badnewsbears, through and through.
Anyone who has dealt with them knows this.
Anyone who has seen the work ethic of the employees they represent knows this.
Posting as AC because you and your alt accounts routinely mod my shit down.
I look forward to your presentation of proof, which I am sure is forthcoming.
Re:Grow Ops in Marin? (Score:4, Informative)
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A long time ago? Okay, I guess I'm getting old, the last time I rode Amtrak was 1991, and they had a fire-tender. He was basically a security guard.
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Ah, I see you've heard the propaganda I mentioned.
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Who do you work for, Spun?
My guess: the city or the federal gov't. Perhaps a union job at a Fortune-500.
I work very long and hard for my money and I am surrounded by people in union jobs who lean on a broom from 9-5.
Explain to me how my eyes have been affected by propaganda.
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Two words: Confirmation bias.
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Real people like who, exactly? So far, it's just you and your stories. Not a lot of hard data there.
To be fair, that's the same amount of evidence you've been presenting..
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>>>union labor pushing to keep meter-readers in business.
Seriously? My electric company eliminated meter readers almost 20 years ago. They replaced the outside meter with a new one that dials-in the reading each month. No more need for a guy to go-round reading the scale.
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Could be the real reason for those privacy concerns, and more power to them.
Yeah, maybe. But they give a pseudo-scientific reason for the ban:
The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters."
Us 'mericans is gettin dummer by the minute. Why don't they just say that if GOD wanted your power measured, he would have created the meters with smarts already. It makes about as much sense.
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Marin Country holds a special kind of stupid. Nobody is as stupid as a rich, privileged person who thinks they are members of the counter-culture. Marin Country is full of that kind of person. San Francisco bankers and ad agency execs who think they are hip and cool because they work in San Francisco. Ex military industrial complex finks from southern California who got laid off by Reagan and found New Age spirituality. Huckster Gurus with an online degree from Spiritual American University. Marin is full o
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If you're sucking down a heavy amount of juice from the grid to power your grow lamps, it'll show up on a regular meter. Would the smart meters really provide any additional useful information to our brave Drug Warriors?
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If you're sucking down a heavy amount of juice from the grid to power your grow lamps, it'll show up on a regular meter. Would the smart meters really provide any additional useful information to our brave Drug Warriors?
That doesn't matter, what matters is what the growers think it will do.
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It might actually.
Consider a grow op that puts some but not all of their lamps through the meter lamps through the meter (and the rest either from a tap-in before the meter or from other sources). The meter reader sees readings that look fairly normal for a domestic property and no suspicion is raised.
However the smart meter would see power cycling in lockstep with the timers on the grow-lamps. Maybe you could stagger them but I bet the pattern would still look very different from a normal household.
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It's increasingly common up here in Seattle for drug growers to rent a house with somebody else's information and grow pot there. A system like this would likely make the period of time between moves shorten dramatically and mak
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How much electricity is actually required to operate marijuana growing lamps for one household? Unless they are growing enough to sell, should they even worry about this at all? A single PC probably uses more power than a few lamps...
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I used to do network security for a non-profit medical marijuana club in San Francisco. I can tell you that even one four hundred watt light, the bare minimum you could possibly use, would use a lot of electricity. You keep it on 24/7 for 2-3 weeks, then step down to 12/7 over the course of a week or two, and run at 12/7 for three months. A more typical setup would be four one thousand watt lights. Your electric bill would average over $800 a month for that.
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Yeah, it doesn't make sense when you think about it, but these are stoner hippies we're talking about. They tend to be a little paranoid.
Besides, you can always cover your tracks by purchasing an electric kiln and running your own 'pottery business.' While such a business might use roughly the same amount of electricity overall, it would have a very different duty cycle from grow lights.
My guess.... (Score:2)
Re:My guess.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If by "they" you mean the energy corporations, you're right. County officials being among the easiest of all government officials to bribe, and usually the least expensive, I can't imagine that the 2010 version of Enron would miss such an opportunity.
Oblig (Score:2)
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Fortunately, there is already an answer to those "significant health questions."
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Not just broadcast towers, but electricity distribution towers; my dad worked on them for forty years. When you're that close to a 30kV cable at 60 Hz, it seems if there were some untoward effects from EMF that they would show up in my dad (now 80) or the guys he worked with. But I've seen no studies showing that electrical workers suffer any more diseases than anyone else (except indoor wiremen, who often suffer from asbestosis and other asbestos related diseases).
EMF (Score:2)
The ordinance also mentions "significant health questions" raised about "increased electromagnetic frequently radiation (EMF) emitted by the wireless technology in SmartMeters."
I wonder how many in the Marin County government also don't carry cellular phones (often near their hips or groins), or use wifi, or bluetooth.
Data over power lines? (Score:3)
Could set up a solution so that the data is sent over the power lines instead of being wireless?
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I asked this question to PGE.
They claimed that they looked into it, but the bandwidth was not wide enough.
Really? What kind of bandwidth does one need to send power usage information?
My guess was that they wanted to set up another "last mile" network for later commercialization.
Network over power lines is the obvious solution for a smart meter, and that is a common setup in Europe.
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They claimed that they looked into it, but the bandwidth was not wide enough.
Really? What kind of bandwidth does one need to send power usage information?
1 bit per day transfer speeds would by far exceed the information they get by someone reading the meter...
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The common reason for not using BPL is that you need to "hop" ove
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Not much. But consider what happens when a security hole is found. Say it requires a 2MB firmware update on all 10M of your customers' meters.
(smart meter firmware size)*(installed base)/bandwidth = (minimum number of days the attacker has blinkenlights capability over your grid)
I can't take credit for this observation. I can dig up the reference if you'd like.
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Couldn't they build in some sort of (broad/multi)cast into the spec so they can send firmware updates to everybody at once?
Smart meters are not the solution anyway (Score:2)
carbon footprint (Score:2)
could well actually increase total electricity consumption and therefore the carbon footprint
What about the carbon footprint of all the vehicles used daily by meter readers? How can a lower power transmission come close to that?
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They already installed mine back when I was unable to decline for any reason. My concerns are the documented inaccuracies, signal interference with wifi, security (anyone with a bit of electronics know how can read your meter) and general pointlessness (since they still have to read the meters by hand to bill you).
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Seems they could simply add a module to track all of that throughout the month then have the meterperson gather that when they make their rounds... if that's what smart meters are really intended for.
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They already installed mine back when I was unable to decline for any reason. My concerns are the documented inaccuracies, signal interference with wifi, security (anyone with a bit of electronics know how can read your meter) and general pointlessness (since they still have to read the meters by hand to bill you).
Not the ones around here. They can remotely read them from quite a distance away. They still have to drive around. But there's less driving, less stop and go, and no reading by hand.
And the unions ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Investing isn't a viable option for those that don't have a job, or are just squeaking by with the bare essentials.
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A progressive tax system is one where the tax cuts aren't going to predominantely richer people, but in a way which is either equal or benefits the lower classes by requiring higher income earners to pay proportional to the benefit they receive from the state not folding.
900Mhz != HF amateur band (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter [wikipedia.org]
I'm not claiming this wiki article is complete, but the amateur HF bands are far far away from 900Mhz. I could understand a complaint if the switching supply in the meters (that drives the embedded logic) spewed harmonic RFI and/or dumped noise on the line due to a bad (cheap) design. I think electronic dimmers, radio driven electric fences, and existing broadband-over-power solutions are much bigger threats to HF bands than the circuits in these things.
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Oops, I forgot that there's a 900Mhz AR band now. My apologies..
You're coming at it the wrong way (Score:3)
You're attempting to apply some rational analysis to the problem, when the problem is actually irrational behavior. It doesn't matter that there's a 900 MHz band or where bands are at all. What matters is that a bunch of misled or malicious folks misled other folks into becoming the horde of angry villagers with pitchforks and firebrands chasing something that they don't understand
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Amateur Radio has a secondary allocation on 900-928Mhz. The ordinance doesn't say anything about HF.
Also, there are first responder radio systems in 900Mhz, and these smart meters don't play nice.
Not that... (Score:2)
...I agree with the reasoning behind it (seems like a lot of handwaving - especially the "wifi is scary and will kill your children while you sleep" bit) but frankly I'm glad. In my experience Smart Meters are little more than a money grab by the utility/landlord and have a negligible effect on actual consumption. When I was renting an apartment a few years ago they offered to install one in my apartment. "Stop paying for your neighbors electricity and pay for your own" they told me. Although I wasn't a
Marin crosses the line.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Marin crosses the line in legislating psuedo-science into an active ordinance. I hear the anti_smart-meter people present their case on KBOO (www.kboo.fm) radio, the world-class alternative radio station out of southeast Portland Oregon USA. They're well-intentioned and enthusiastic, but they really seem a little touched with the ol'hippy paranoia 'all science is evil' herb-induced vibe.
Marin is a strange place. I've visited there many times and it seems normal and well-ordered, but it has a true bizarre historical undercurrent that goes back a hundred years (even before all the rich hippies moved there in the 1970s). It's =almost= the kind of place that would pass a law forcing the sun to rise in the West in order to get a great morning sunrise for the folks living in Stinson Beach. It is exactly the kind of place that people would ban a technology that they don't quite understand and doesn't appear to do anything to make them younger and more beautiful and more hip (and more rich). They are exactly the kind of people who would consider a piece of equipment from the power company ('a rather déclassé institution run by drab ordinary pedestrian types, not-our-sort-of-globally-aware-organic-people', dahrling) that emits radio signals from their home-lifespace to be an evil intrusion. If it's not spying on you for the Republicans, then it's trying to keep track of how much electricity is being diverted from your hot tub to the grow lights in your secret garden.
Marin has probably changed a lot since "The Serial" was published in the late 1970s, but it's the kind of place where the people pay a lot of money and a lot of karmic energy to make sure that it doesn't change all that much. Still they have crossed the line on this one issue.
Personally, I'd love to live in Marin. The MILFs are as gorgeous as the models. It's the 'coolest' place on earth. The grass is greener and everything's always groovy, no matter how stupid and ugly the rest of the world becomes. But I'm a little too ugly and a little to poor to be accepted as one of the 'golden cloud people' north of the Golden Gate.
All about increased bills (Score:3)
This is really about some people who have seen vastly increased bills. Now, the question is: are the new meters wrong or were the old electromechanical meters (installed decades ago) wrong?
Occam, whare are you? Or, as the saying goes, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
Werner Erhard & Vaccination Scare Crowd (Score:2)
This neck of the woods is populated by the 'cult crowd' mentality as far as I see and hear it.
Erhards EST & the 'exclusive gathering' with inside information about XX (be it global warming, vaccinations & autism, or TV and miscarriages) manages to put a scare in darned near everything.
It is almost impossible for me to stop laughing when the newest 'fact' of coming doom is related in Marin.
Problem is, that if I laugh, I loose some good friends.
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Problem is, that if I laugh, I loose some good friends.
Then what happens? Is their grip on reality so tenuous that they float off into the sky or something?
Two SmartGrid dirty secrets (Score:5, Interesting)
One. Advertised: if the utility company is having trouble delivering the demanded power, they can reduce the voltage a little bit and buy/generate a little bit less (expensive) peak power. Your lights will burn a little less brightly, but you probably won't notice.Not advertised: if the utility company is having trouble making money or needs a place to sink their spinning reserves during off-peak demand, they can use SG to raise the delivered voltage to end customers. Your lights will burn a little brighter, but you probably won't notice. It will also cost you a little bit more. Too bad.
Two. Advertised: through price signals and load shedding, the utility can reduce the peak-to-trough difference in electricity demand, lowering the cost of delivering electric power and passing the savings on to you. Not advertised: the utility can replace fast-response generators like natural gas with slower response generators like coal, because they don't need as much fast response generation capacity to deal with their now smaller peaks. Of course, coal has a bigger carbon footprint than gas. Too bad.
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"the utility can replace fast-response generators like natural gas with slower response generators like coal, because they don't need as much fast response generation capacity to deal with their now smaller peaks. Of course, coal has a bigger carbon footprint than gas."
Or nuclear (which I believe is also slow-response), which has a smaller carbon footprint than gas.
good luck with that (Score:2)
Yeah, federal law pre-empts, only the FCC gets to regulate wireless devices and their use. I'm pretty sure (IANAL) that this is a case where the power company, if it wishes, can simply ignore the ordinance. And the country is stupid enough to try to enforce fines or sue, crush them in court.
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radio interference (Score:2)
As far as radio interference goes, Wenzel's Techlib [techlib.com] has some info about how to mitigate this. Of course, sdddddddddddwsssssssssssssss cvvvvvvvvvvvvvv;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Sorry, cat got on keyboard. Anyway. Of course, it's not like the technicians installing the meters are checking for ground loops... but perhaps they should be? If there is that much potential to interfere with first responders, you'd think some tests on the wiring would be in order...
FUD (Score:2)
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Personally, I think "smart meters" are an exceedingly dumb idea.
But your comment is completely ambiguous and content-free, so I cannot discuss it with you.
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My guess is that there are already products I could install on my own if I wanted to monitor my power consumption. That device doesn't needs serve as a remote-controlled kill switch on my electricity at the same time.
My main objection is from the security angle. The more I learn about data security, the more clear it is just how inevitable it is that complex systems will get pwned. Imagine that if the Stuxnet developers, instead of targeting a few thousand centrifuges in Iran, had decided to target a few