Smart Meters and Stupid Policies, part 2:
Roll 'Em Out, Move 'Em Out
A NETWIT special report
NEW IMPROVED HEAD is pleased to present the second of a new three-part series from the experts at the NETWork Interested In Telling-it-like-it-is. Last week's first instalment was about how yet another government plan to reduce debt isn't reducing it. This week's instalment is about how Ontario's plan to introduce smart meters is doomed to failure.The Ontario Liberal government puts great stock in "smart meters". This is a renaming of what were always called "interval meters", which record energy use during preset intervals – such as an hour – rather than producing a continuous record that gets read periodically. The government plans to roll out 800,000 meters by 2008 and have them in all residences by 2010.This is a colossal waste of money. There is no evidence that these will result in any load reduction. It is telling that the Minister of Energy assiduously avoids putting out any estimates of load savings. The cost is officially estimated as over $1 billion, but it will actually come in closer to $4 billion when the annual cost of servicing the meters is taken into account.
Government spin emphasizes only the first cost of installation, which is a small part of the total cost, which also includes telecommunications infrastructure, software and labour costs. A fraction of this money put into a simple program to send teams to install compact fluorescent bulbs would yield at least the same load reduction, and more reliably.
This whole fiasco is reminiscent of another ill-fated project of the previous Peterson Libs, the ICON computer. The ICON was a computer for Ontario's schools put into place by a crash program (technically, the Tories, at the end of their 43 year dynasty, started it but the Libs embraced it and dished out most of the money). The result; a lot of disused useless machines and about a billion dollars (in today's money) into the coffers of Burroughs/Unisys and various software firms.
The real stories are the influence of the telecom industry and the gullibility of the electricity distributors. But don't get us started. The electricity distributors have dreams of glory as the owners of the "one wire" that brings cable, phone, security services and electric power into buildings. This is an old dream, and smart meters just provide a new muse. In addition, for years there have been medicine men touting the cost savings of AMR – Automated Meter Reading – using a variety of remote measurement (telemetry) techniques: wireless, phone lines, and (experimentally) powerlines. Pilot study after pilot study has found that these savings are illusory and it's still cheaper to use "shank's pony" (walking) and a notebook. No guys, you're the patsies for Ted Rogers and Bell.
It could make sense to roll out a new generation of solid-state meters as old electromechanical meters are retired – if, indeed, the costs of the solid-state meters have come down – and it could make sense, one day, to have widespread AMR. That way, the inevitable bugs in the new technology will get ironed out, as once was true of the older meters.
It would not necessarily make any sense to use the full interval capacity of the meters, either (assuming that they work reliably) because of the difference of orders of magnitude in the data processing. The new system requires 8,760 measurements a year to be sent to collector-points, uploaded, maintained and processed for 4 million addresses if there are different rates for peak, mid-peak and off-peak power, versus 6 to 36 measurements under the current system). No, the reason for the unseemly haste is to build new telecom networks (to support the telemetry) and offload the (huge) costs to a different constituency (electricity bills rather than cable and phone bills).
Largely the same pockets – ours – but under a different guise.
[Next week: There's a nuke in your future! In fact, there'll be lots of them!]Smart Meters and Stupid Policies, part 2: Roll 'Em Out, Move 'Em Out © NETWIT, 2006 Posted March 1, 2006
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