While corporations are all going “smart” with digital and wireless equipment and metering of their “services”, there is nothing in our political system which requires, or even encourages, “smart” people to run for office. There is nothing in our political system which prevents “analogue” headed types (or even log-headed types) from running our towns, our cities, our states and our federal government.
With the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case [1] people will lose complete control of their lives to corporations –because those government employees who the people have elected (and hired) to protect the interests of the people – will never have adequate brain power or motivation to wrestle with the corporate interests and keep the people on balanced, equitable footing with the corporations.
Here is one small case in point: Over the last few years Toronto, Ontario has installed new electric meters made by Elster [2] (Image above Eastpole's from Flicker) for every residential electricity user on the grid. The entire Province of Ontario will be “smart metered” by the end of 2010. One of the aspects of “smart metering” is time-of-use data recording. With time-of-use metering the KWH rate is higher at certain times of weekdays and lower at “off peak” times. From 7am to 11am and from 5pm to 9pm weekdays every residential customer will be charged more for electricity used.
There is nothing with time of use which by itself saves energy – the only potential for saving is the potential to save grid transmission infrastructure and the potential to decrease total peak demand, and consequently to allow the total grid generating capacity to meet the total demand – or a lower demand. By maintaining or lowering total demand the building of new electric generation facilities will be deferred, and existing generation facilities will be able to be operated more efficiently (because of more even demand loading).
The point is this: all the benefits of time of use metering automatically inure to the corporate power suppliers, and no benefits automatically inure to the residential power purchaser.
Why did Toronto Hydro allow new “smart” metering - which provide time-of-use rate - WITHOUT providing every residential customer “smart” circuit breakers which allow the customer to wirelessly control from the internet every circuit in their home [2]?
How Smart is leaving the rate payer at more of a disadvantage after the installation of new technology than before the new technology was installed? Not Smart,
That’s how our political system works. Not Smart.
Another irony in the Elster meter installation is that they use a two way wifi mesh for constant data collection – the meter can even be disconnected remotely – yet while Toronto’s electrical regulatory commission provides cutting edge wifi capability to the corporate utility, there is no free wifi mesh for the citizens, nor any internet public access to the energy data collected. That's REALLY SMART, EH?