Just as the battle was starting up again for wireless dominance within the smart meter industry, Californian utility Pacific Gas & Energy (PG&E) may have come up with the ultimate answer – don’t turn on the radio in the meter. It’s one of those cunning plans which will have the various standards body queuing up to make sure they’re responsible for the chip which is never connected.
This bizarre situation arises from the decision back in March this year, when PG&E worked out what to do with their electro-sensitive customers who were demanding that they weren’t radiated with emissions emanating from their smart meters. PG&E put forward a proposal to make customers pay for non-smart meters, charging somewhere between $135 and $270 a year for the privilege of having a good old-fashioned meter reader come round and leave them a note to say they were out when he called. The double whammy benefit that none of the media appeared to pick up is that the $270 charge would eat into these user’s mobile phone bill, so they’d have less money to spend on getting radiated by phoning their local papers to campaign against smart meters. More affluent customers could have the gold plated option of paying several thousand dollars to have their meters moved to the top of local telegraph poles, or buried underground.
PG&E reckoned that this option would be taken up by 185,400 customers. (I don’t know how they got to that precise figure. Although by a strange coincidence, 1854 is the year that Texas was connected by telegraph to the rest of the US, putting in place the telecoms network that Enron would use so effectively 150 years later.) Anyway, this number presented PG&E with a problem. 185,400 is not a lot in terms of commissioning a special non-wireless meter. So they were faced with the prospect of having to pay more for a non-smart meter, wiping out a substantial part of that $50 million annual windfall from their more sensitive customers. Today they announced a solution – they’d supply the same wireless smart meter, but turn the radio off. Enter the wirelessless meter.