“Marin County and the town of Fairfax on Monday asked the California Public Utilities Commission to suspend SmartMeter deployment in their areas while the commission considers creating an opt-out program for whole communities,” The S.F. Chronicle is reporting.
“The commission in February gave individual PG&E customers the choice of refusing the wireless meters, which some consider a threat to their privacy and health. But it has not decided whether towns and cities will be able to opt out en masse.
‘So what we’re looking for is some kind of agreement, a stipulation, to stay put until this process is finished,’ said Lawrence Bragman, a member of the Fairfax Town Council.
“Officials in Marin County and Fairfax have tried to stop SmartMeters before, by imposing moratoriums to block their installation.
“PG&E has installed about 9 million of the digital electricity and natural gas meters throughout Northern and Central California and plans to install roughly 1 million more. The meters transmit data to the utility automatically using a Wi-Fi communication network. That alarms people who believe that radiation from cell phones and other wireless devices endangers human health.
The rest of the article is here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
In the San Francisco Chronicle this past weekend they had a story about the”wifi” water meters being installed. Gas, electric, and now water data will be transmitted along with all the other transmissions. No chance for a mix up there. The air will have an electronic smell to it before long, but at least you’ll get an “up to the nano-second” readout for your bill. Adios meter readers, some of us will miss you.
It’s actually an hour by hour read out and we can access it online at PGE site. It is helpful to see time of day when usage is highest and baseline uses. It is a valuable information tool for conservation. Conservation is the number one way to save energy and lower carbon emissions.
I am willing to bet that the radiation coming off of this meter is negligible compared to any one of house wiring, cell phones, wireless, microwaves, clocks etc. etc.
Leave it to Marin. What a bunch of whiners. We are already constantly being bombarded with radio frequencies of all types.
Anybody who walks outside already is surrounded by all the cordless telephone, cell tower and phone, wireless home and business networks, garage door openers, car key remotes, tv remotes, yada, yada, yada.
What kind of privacy are we talking about here anyway? I can hear the gossip now, “Psst, did you hear? Joe smoked a kilowatt of juice last weekend on that party he threw.” OMG!
If the paranoid indoor pot growers are worried, they should unplug from the grid and switch to LPG and power their grow lights with their own electrical generators.
I don’t want PG&E to have to build more power plants just to support indoor grows.
I’m going on to nearly two months since I had my Smartmeter removed. The terrible nights of sleep and intense ringing in my ear has subsided. It so happens, I had 6 Smartmeters within 80 feet of me. The closest was 15 feet from my bed. Four remain, but further away.
From my own personal experience, they are a health risk.
Concentrations of wifi-mesh Smartmeters as described by Reinette are definitely a problem. This would include an apartment complex with a bank of Smartmeters on the other side of someone’s bedroom wall. Not a good idea.
But PG&E has a pretty bad track record of running a utility company the past few decades. Just ask San Bruno, where PG&E managed to blow up an entire neighborhood and kill a bunch of people. (Still not sure why some key PG&E execs aren’t behind bars on that one.)
So yeah, bad installation guidelines for installing Smartmeters by PG&E? And poor/arrogant communications during the rollout? Why would anyone think it would be otherwise?
That being said, Smartmeters themselves are the wave of the future and will be a mandatory component of the Universal Smart Grid once we are able to drag everyone kicking and screaming into the 21st century, as correctly noted by Greg Zaller.
The wifi-mesh technology chosen by PG&E, however, was probably a poor technological choice. Smart grid information should instead be sent over the grid itself–power over ethernet, or PoE. Plenty of vendors do this, just not the one PG&E unfortunately chose.
The question is did the removal of the smartmeter help stop these issues for you?