On 4/15/2012 11:16 AM, Home Guy wrote:
Way Back Jack wrote:

in terms of energy savings, privacy, fire risk, and, most
importantly, health ramifications. Thank You.

The only purpose of smart meters for residential customers is to reduce
the meter-reading costs of electric utilities.

The exhorbitant up-front cost of the meters themselves, the
communications network and billing software will be paid for by
customers in the form of additional surcharges.

All other aspects of smart meters represents a false economy, because
residential customers don't use enough electricity (individually) to
warrant the use of time-of-day billing, as opposed to large commercial,
retail or industrial customers.

Residential customers don't consume enough electricity on an individual
level such that any decision they make in changing (or time-shifting)
their electricity usage will only affect their monthly bill by pennies
or at most a few dollars....

Overall, just nonsense.

If there weren't a payback, they certainly wouldn't be doing it just for
the funsies of having something to do.

Shifting usage of a _single_ residence slightly from peak to off-peak
hours won't make an impact, sure, but when 10s or 100s of thousands do a
little it can (and will) add up to a lot. That will translate back into
not having to expand/upgrade transmission lines, substations, etc.,
etc., etc., and perhaps even over time at least delaying addition of
generation.

All that will add up to significant savings that eventually will impact
the consumer by at least limiting rate increases over what they would
otherwise be (and unless there's a change in administration and rollback
of recent EPA directives "you ain't see'ed nuttin' yet" on what's going
to happen to rates.

If the current CSAPR rule that were to go into effect Jan 1 but was
stayed by a Federal Court at the last minute (almost literally) in
December ends up being implemented, there _will_ be rolling blackouts as
there simply won't be enough generation to satisfy demand and your
hypothetical folks will be turning the thermostat A/C off (not by
choice) intermittently, not up.

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