The recent NYTimes article “New Electricity Meters Stir Fears” describes the opposition that Pacific Gas and Electric is facing in their installation of wireless smart meters, which give hour-by-hour electricity usage information to PG&E. They have faced opposition from Tea Partiers and lefty (like me!) vaccine-rejecting homeopathic-remedy-buying aromatherapy huffers (not like me!) over health and privacy concerns.
I’m not especially sympathetic to any of the parties involved.
The health issue
Many object to the meters on the grounds that, by wirelessly transmitting usage information back to PG&E, they pose a health hazard. According to the article, at a recent hearing on the issue, someone requested that everyone in the audience turn off their cellphones out of consideration for those people in the audience who are electrosensitive (short for “electromagnetically hypersensitive”). I would love to have been a smartass in attendance. “Hi. I’m hypersensitive to pseudoscience, so if everyone here could turn off their pseudoscience I would really appreciate it. When people don’t, I suffer symptoms like holding my head in my hand and having an interior monologue that consists entirely of shouted obscenities. Thanks.”
I don’t fault these invidividuals for fearing electromagnetic radiation (EMR). They probably don’t know much of the science behind EMR, and it is arguably wise to fear, to some degree, things we don’t understand. (E.g., I consider myself a scientifically literate individual, but I nevertheless do not have a solid understanding of what would happen if I attached jumper cables to three car batteries in series and pressed the clamps against my temples—perhaps the voltage would be too low for me to feel anything, or perhaps it would be quite unpleasant. Until I learn more about what 37.8 volts across the temples is like, it is wise for me to avoid doing this and rational for me to fear what might happen.) But that fear should be directed into learning more about it before automatically mobilizing against it. After learning more about it—and by learning, I mean learning, not just reading what some crystal peddler has to say about it—if they are still concerned about EMR, then by all means they should picket and wail and ask people to turn off their cellphones out of consideration for the electrosensitive. But if they can’t be bothered to learn the science of EMR, they should STFU.
Now, it is not fair to say that there is no scientific basis for worrying about EMR. Some EMR is unquestionably harmful (UV light and X-rays, for instance), so wavelength and intensity need to be taken into consideration. (Of course, we understand why EMR at UV and higher frequencies/shorter wavelengths is harmful: it is ionizing radiation, so it can break chemical bonds, damaging DNA and so on.) The only known biological impact of cellphone signals (which have wavelengths on the order of 25cm) is that they are converted to heat when they are absorbed by body tissue, which warms the tissue. Of course, that effect will be slight, since the amount of heat delivered by a cellphone signal would be insignificant compared to, say, the heat you’d get from sitting next to a cat. But the fact that we don’t know of any other mechanism by which such signals could be harmful does not not mean they are not harmful, so let’s give the EMR-fearing crowd the benefit of the doubt on the potential for a non-negligible biological effect.
What I want to know is, if they’re so worried about EMR, why do they do so little about the EMR exposure that is within their control? If I don’t want to expose myself to UV, I wear a hat and long sleeves. Protecting oneself from wireless signals is not much harder. They could make Faraday cages in their homes. They could wear tinfoil hats and metal mesh clothing that would reflect most the of wireless communication signals that hit them. (Of course, such a suit will also reflect from the inside, but the amount deflected would vastly outweigh the amount reflected from the inside.) Why are the electrosensitive not wearing these, if their symptoms are so bad?
To be fair, a few people who believe they are electrosensitive actually do line rooms of their homes with foil and wear metal mesh hoods that make them look like beekeepers. If these individuals don’t want a wireless transmitter attached to their house, I say we let them opt out.
My own opposition to them wirelessly transmitting hourly usage information is that it’s a waste of electromagnetic spectrum. It’s just bad form to use wireless for this when the house is already tethered by wires to the rest of the world.
The privacy issue
If someone is providing a resource to you, I don’t see the basis for demanding that they don’t know how much they’re providing to you. If you don’t want PG&E to know how much you’re consuming from hour to hour, then you have a few options:
- Form a utility to compete against PG&E.
- Stop using electricity.
- Go off the grid.
- Install an energy storage device to obscure your actual usage pattern.
- Make toast at 3am to throw them off your electron trail. Take that, The Man!
Some opponents raise the concern that the information could fall into the hands of hackers. That, however, is a separate issue. If I buy something from an online merchant, they’re going to ask for my credit card information and address; I cannot call that an invasion of my privacy. I might nevertheless worry that they will get hacked. But the solution is to improve security, not to stop them from asking for my credit card information—after all, they can’t be expected to send me stuff for free. Likewise, the power company should not be expected to give me electricity for free, and for them to charge different rates at different times—a good change, since it will discourage use at peak hours, when generation is dirtiest—they need to know power consumption at a finer level of granularity than a monthly reading.
PG&E BS
Like I said, there is a legitimate use for tracking electricity usage on an hour-by-hour basis: it allows the price of electricity to increase when demand is higher. This provides an incentive to use less electricity when demand is highest, which is good, since increased demand is met by relying more heavily on the most polluting forms of electricity generation. Now, one could have meters that simply track peak vs. off-peak, but hourly tracking would allow for prices to more fluidly change based on demand. Yet, reading PG&E’s website about SmartMeter, I see nothing about this aspect of hourly metering.
They emphasize several specious reasons for why smart meters are necessary. The first is that it helps the consumer understand their electricity usage better, and thus reduce it; this is bogus because it would be cheaper and more effective for them to issue a Kill A Watt sort of device to each customer. (Providing people with hour-by-hour total usage information is not very helpful—all it will show people is that they use more electricity when they’re home than when they’re not, without suggesting what the big offenders within their home are beyond the utterly obvious.)
Another reason they cite is some kind of green smart grid efficiency thing. But how does hourly metering of individual residences allow their network to operate any more efficiently than, say, continuous metering of distribution transformers (the last transformers between the main grid and your home) would?
They also say that it will help them better respond to power outages. Again, what does hourly metering of individual residences get them that metering of distribution transformers doesn’t?
There might very well be a good answer to these questions (perhaps metering distribution transformers isn’t feasible, say), but PG&E doesn’t offer such an answer.
The right reason to hate PG&E
To PG&E’s credit, they pulled out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in response to the Chamber’s resistance to action on climate change. But that must have just been a PR move, because the notion that PG&E has any concern whatsoever for the public interest is refuted by the $46 million they spent lobbying for Proposition 16 in California, which was basically evil and thankfully defeated. PG&E dishonestly promoted Prop 16—the “Taxpayers Right to Vote” act—as giving taxpayers more say about utilities. What it actually would have done is require a 2/3 majority in order for a municipality to set up its own utility to compete against PG&E. Such a utility might be created because the people in that community want to buy clean energy, or because they just want lower rates than what PG&E charges. A 2/3 majority is hard to get in general; it would be impossible to obtain in this case: PG&E, as a private entity, could spend all they want campaigning against such a utility, while the municipality, being a public entity, could not spend any money campaigning for it. For attempting to have their monopoly built into California’s constitution, PG&E should be treated an enemy of the public interest.
Pisiformity 