Posted on 01/17/2014 12:12:07 AM PST by ransomnote
I spoke to someone yesterday that I have not seen since 1996. I met him at the Barbican in London, he was an Inventor and I was an inventor and we were both displaying products, i then met him a few months later at the Southampton Science fair and we went out for a few beers.
So he worked in electronics and when I met him yesterday he told me something that I could never imagine and still cant believe it but it does seem true as I did a couple of searches and thing are happening as he told me, anyway here is the conversation roughly how it went.
Hi hows things not saw you for ages what are you doing ( Im going to call him X so you know when he was talking)
X : doing ok keeping busy. Me: where are you working then.
X: I work in R& D developing the latest smart meters.
Me: Ive heard about them you run out of milk and your fridge orders you another pint from Tesco's.
X: ha ha' thats what they want you to think, i suppose if Tescos want to do that then they can but the power compaines have not invested £3.5 billion to make tescos money.
Me: So what is the point of them.
X: people are moaning about their eletric bills just now but they would give anything to get back to what they are paying now two years from now.
(Excerpt) Read more at abovetopsecret.com ...
Abovetopsecret makes Weekly World News look respectable. There’s probably about as much truth in that article as there is in the Bat Boy stories.
ransomnote: Way to feed us to the ad mill, jerk.
George Noory and Art Bell told me so!
Yea ? They put a new smart meter on my house 2 months ago my electric bill jumped 170 bucks just last month i hate to think what its going to be this month and were scrooges with electric !
Same here..I called them on it because there was no way my bill could be that high. Took a month or two but they fixed it back to “normal” use.
That meter probably has a time of use function that logs usage by the second, minute, hour. They could then just charge you more depending on what time of day it was and what their ‘load’ on the grid was. Look for the words ‘variable pricing’ in their literature.
What is worse here in Maryland the power company wants to put a control on your heat/air so that in periods of high load they can cut back your usage; ie turn the heat/air down. I told them to go fish
Remember the ones who used to come around and make the dogs bark. Now the electric and even some of the gas meter guys are gone and a ton of money was saved.
I just wish they had passed on the savings to us.
I can't accept the word of someone who doesn't understand that words mean things.
You wouldn’t make an acception in his case?
Know. Wood ewe?
X reads a little like Ulsterman
Smart meters report usage every 15 minutes. The idea is to bill higher for use during peak periods and lower during idler times.
Power generation isn’t like throwing a switch. If there’s a sudden surge in demand, the generators have to be started up, which takes time, or the additional power has to be purchased from someone on the grid who has excess. If there’s none immediately available, you brown out.
Electricity can’t be stored efficiently, so it must be generated on demand, and it takes a while to respond to spikes. So it’s not unreasonable for power companies to want to smooth out the demand curve. Smart metering is one way they’re doing that.
I’m not surprised. Went to a meeting Wed pm where folks from Empower Texas stated that our PUC (public utility commission) wants to allow power providers to bill based upon their CAPACITY to use rather than what the customer actually used. The power companies aren’t making enough.
I believe anything is possible - look what Enron did the year before they imploded. heating bills more than mortgage pmts. no refunds were given.
Deborah Tavares - Smart Meters at Oathkeeperss Meeting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5mAOyp6fRc
http://www.stopthecrime.net/smartmeters/index.html
Searching FR using “smart meter” turned up a list of articles
Most recent:
Smart Meters join ObamaCare in monitoring Floridas Serfs
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3111223/posts
From 2011
Ironically-Named Smart Meters Prove to Be a Dumb Idea
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2695671/posts
“Smart Meter” search would turn up many results so narrow the search by adding + cost of energy.
The link below was posted on page 2 of the thread posted.
California Allows Power Companies to Charge Different Rates Throughout the Day in 2018
http://nextcity.org/theworks/entry/california-allows-power-companies-time-of-use-solar-power
The smart meters are much more accurate long-term than the old EM (electromechanical) meters, because the electronics can better compensate for temperature, and there is no wear like there is in the EM meters.
The meters are calibrated for accuracy in the factory, and are spot-checked by the utilities. It is in their financial interest to have them accurate. So there goes the theory about them being used to raise your power bill.
The primary reason for smart meters, though, is to allow time-of-day-based rates ("peak shaving") in residences. If the power company can get updates every hour or so on what the (for example) A/C demand out in the 'burbs is doing to their line voltage, they will have better control over where and when to add auxiliary generation.
When they bring a generator online, it costs money. They don't do it until they absolutely have to do so to keep the power line voltages from sagging too far, which causes a brownout and causes motors and transformers to heat up.
There's FAR too much paranoia out there. It mostly because people don't understand the basic premise of electric utilities: power has to be generated as it's used, because there is no economically-sound way to store electric energy at the power levels the grid delivers.
Wrong. That was just a side effect.
(BTW, I'm still in smart metering, but in the water industry instead of electric & gas.)
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