News from Energy Advocate - Life of the Land on 'Smart Grids'

Forwarded message from Henry Curtis of Life of the Land. Recommend their webpage and supporting them:

Aloha,

Suppose the utility switched the way it measured your electric meter from once a month meter person to instantaneous readings.

The utility could use it for good, to find ways of leveling the load, of shifting load from peak periods to low use periods. Then new power plants would not be needed, new transmission lines could be delayed. Bills would go down. The utility profit would shrink. … Why would they do that?

Perhaps because the utility makes a profit on everything they do, and merging electricity and the internet would be costly. Therefore a lot of profit could be made.

Perhaps the utility could figure out a lot about you … when you turn on the air conditioner, when your electric water heater needs to go on to replace the water you use in the shower, how long your showers are, when you are home, whether you turned on your security system. Perhaps they can sell this information to those who track such information, or perhaps use it themselves.

Should we go down the road towards greater smart electric grids and smart chips or should we favor decentralized, local systems on rooftops installed by competing solar and wind companies focusing on residential and commercial on-site installations?

These are the issues we raised in our testimony that we filed today in a regulatory proceeding before the Public Utilities Commission. We are the only consumer, environmental, public interest type in docket 2008-0303: Advanced Meter Infrastructure and Time of Use Rates a.k.a. the necessary precursor to the Smart Grid docket.

As is common in other regulatory proceedings we are in, the utility will file their testimony only after they have seen ours.

We are also in regulatory proceedings (dockets) on energy efficiency, biofuels, feed in tariffs, and planning.

Henry