It is generally agreed that smart meters are a necessary technology to manage electricity demand from the electrical grid and micro-generation using domestic solar or wind turbines.
These smart meters will collect a lot of information about electricity usage in each home that will be held in huge central databases. That information is valuable to both businesses and the government.
Is this going to become a huge surveillance network that will intrude upon personal liberty?
They’ll know how much electricity you use on an hourly basis and so be able to monitor you instead of knowing it on a quarterly basis when they read the meter but by then it’ll be too late to thwart your plans!
Not really, no. I don’t think there’s any evidence that the data is going to be kept with personally identifiable information, that energy use patterns really say much about you, or that you have any right to privacy on your electricity use.
Depending on how you define ‘right to privacy on your electricity use’. We had a thread here not that long ago about a woman that pointed a gun at two people trying to swap out her meter for a smart meter. Turns out you’re legally allowed to request that you keep a ‘regular’ meter if you want to. I don’t know if that’s due to your contract with the utility or a local/state/fed law. But all that does is give them less resolution. Instead of knowing how much power you use on a nearly instantaneous basis, it only tells them how much you use between sending someone out (in my area that was every other month).
I know that mine is kept, as a matter of fact when I got my last bill it told me quite a bit of information about my daily energy usage. It also compared it to my usage from last year.
Around here, Maryland, they are starting to push for us to sign up for a ‘free’ energy day, meaning we will not be charged on that day for what we do, but the price goes up for the rest of the week. They also want us to have them install a smart thermostat so they can control the temps in our homes if need be. I’d rather they not have that ability as I already have a thermostat that I can program myself.
Yeah. They will use it in a series of happy mailers to you outlining your usage and how you might lower it. Right now I get my average usage compared to other houses ‘like mine.’
Dammit. I requested ebilling to save paper and now I get these what feels like every month. I called two days ago asking that they stop. The house was built in 1924. It has no insulation and sash windows that rattle. We’re working on it,* but we’re going to be using more energy than a new house for the forseeable future.
have replaced the siding and windows on two sides of the house, adding insulation - but I can only afford one side of the house per year
You are corrent, I misspoke. Your energy provider has a clear reason to collect that data on your account - it wouldn’t make much sense otherwise. I was referring to some possible national database on energy use drawn from providers all over the country and controlled by the government. I don’t see why there would be any need for personally identifiable information in that hypothetical database. It’s possible but unclear why anyone would set up that sort of system. To what end?
At least this thread isn’t rambling paranoia about how beaming information through the airwaves is going to give us all cancer, like I’ve seen elsewhere.
I manage a property where our usage and rates can spike dramatically if a pump or motor is starting to fail…(tier pricing) so I really like the new meters for their instantaneous readouts.
I used to use a stopwatch and have to time the rotation of the dial and do the" on the fly" math stuff…which I’m not good at.
We had a large xmas party last year, every light turned on :eek: and looking at the account online, you could see the party in progress!!..haha…and the overage we (the boss) got into!! 3rd tier!!
The meters are for a fixed location, often an individual domicile. How much more “personally identifiable” could there be, short of tagging electrical gear so it reports the electrons it uses?
It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes’ thought to come up with some simple algorithms that could tell an observer of this data stream quite a few interesting things about the user.
The problem, and what I perpetually see people misstating and misunderstanding, is that this single data stream is NOT recorded in a vacuum. It’s a thread, a pattern of dots, amid hundreds and thousands of others that *are *“personally identifiable.” When people dismiss things like license plate tagging or cell phone records or power usage or the like as “containing no useful information,” they seem to forget that, say, most of the items of evidence in a complex larceny or murder trial “contains no useful information” by itself. It’s the intelligent aggregation of this data that represents information of value.
I will admit that monitoring power usage is quite low on the value list by any standard I can think up at the moment, but it’s one more thread in the stream of individualized big data that, yes, we should be concerned about.
Hmm. Pray expound, counselor. What makes my (personally paid) electricity use a matter of public record? Or even controlled governmental record?
Depends. Have you already finished worrying about how much your ISP knows about your web browsing practices? How much your phone company knows about who you call and when you call them?
Compared to that, knowing when you turn on your TV at night seems fairly innocuous.
I’m less worried about the privacy aspects than that they may choose to jack up my rates if I have my air conditioner turned on if it’s actually hot outside.
Your browser reports you researching hydroponics, and your cell phone says you visited the hydro store.
Next there’s a bump in your energy consumption- looks like a pretty big load switched on for 12 hours at a time, then 12 off.
Fast forward six weeks to the jackbooted thugs breaking down the door and shooting the dog.
Of an innocent person, growing nothing more dangerous than hot peppers.
They can only know how much energy you’re pulling into your house at any given time. They can’t tell what appliances you’re using unless you tell them, or they have little meters all over your house or something. Smart meters simply make things cheaper for the power company.
The NSA and Google, however, can read all your online communications and collect all your Wifi passwords. Which one should you really worry about?
Smart meters don’t really facilitate that. Even before smart meters, the utility could see an increase in consumption. Paired with a recent interest in hydroponics, you’ve got the exact same scenario, sans smart meter.
They already do. Peak demand rates are higher than off-peak in many places. However, that generation of meters simply switched counts to track peak/offpeak and did not (AFAIK) actually record the usage over time.
Your last sentence is absolutely correct. As with so many other innovations, this one is entirely to benefit the seller and has only downside for the consumer.
However, you are underestimating how much information can be gleaned from a detailed readout of power usage. Engineers can “read” equipment operation by watching power draw and little else; if your recorded electrical pattern shows certain kinds of signatures, especially ones that could be ground-truthed to your specific appliances and equipment, it could be quite telling. (For example, starting up your computer might show a specific spike/steady-state draw that is identifiable on the record.)
In the end, I will worry less about governmental agencies than I will about private companies that answer to no one.