Are Duke Power smart meters really smart?

Alright, let’s deconstruct things logically here. This won’t get into the technical side of things, much — I’m going to hold off on that part, for now. I would like to see how this particular breakdown of things works out before I get into the heavy stuff. Nothing personal — I just want to know what I’m getting into 🙂

So… consider for a moment, your ordinary electric meter. It counts the number of kilowatts of power used by your home or business as a function of time. A kilowatt is a thousand watts (of course), what with metric prefixes being their usual selves here. (There are certain applications of computer science where this is strictly speaking not the case, but that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this, so basically forget that I said that.) A watt is measured as one volt of electrical potential at one ampere (amp) of current. Volts times amps is watts.

OK, one little bit of technical stuff after all. The all-too-overused — but reasonably accurate — water analogy. Consider water in a pipe. The quantity overall of water in the pipe is your voltage. The pressure at which it goes through the pipe is your amperage. Restrict the flow, that’s a resistor (or, rather, its effect — resistance if it’s DC, impedance if AC). A bucket is a capacitor. Fill, then dump You get the rough idea. No, it’s not scientifically perfect — but it gets the point across.

We now return to your regularly scheduled logical breakdown.

So if your house consumes one kilowatt of power in one hour, at the end of that hour, the meter has marked that down on its rolling counter or whatever, and Duke Power, at the end of the month, comes and adds (as I recall) 10.8 cents — plus applicable taxes, fees, interests, flavorful toppings, and maraschino cherries (obvious humor is obvious) — to your power bill.

That’s a standard meter. Okay. So if that’s a standard meter, and that’s ALL a standard meter can do, then it stands to reason that a “smart” meter is called that because it’s capable of doing MORE than a standard meter. Given that the meter on the side of my apartment (and on Mom’s house, coincidentally) already is “smart” enough that it doesn’t need someone to come and physically read the numbers off the dials any more, they just drive by in a pickup truck with a special computer and it wirelessly pings the meter and reads out the info from the road — we can probably pretty well eliminate this being a special connectivity thing. It’s really not practical for everyone’s electric meter to have a direct satellite uplink, for a number of reasons that I’m not going to get into here. Regardless of what’s been added in terms of capabilities, though, there is guaranteed to be a degree of added electronic complexity — which, of course, is not something that gets thrown in for free. The new meters must cost more than the old ones did, per unit. Also, if the new “smart” meters were exactly the same as the old ones in terms of capability, then Duke Power would not feel the need to announce and advertise and square-dance all this new “smart meter” talk out here. They would just silently come and replace it — “oh, it’s a small upgrade, don’t worry about it” — another day at the office. The fanfare itself, simply by existing, indicates that there’s a lot more to see here than that.

Now, let us switch topics for a moment. (I have a reason for doing this — I’ll tie it all together at the end, I promise!) When you consider a business, *any* business, what is the first and most important purpose of that business? To make money. Period. The business might be offering a product or a service or both — but if it’s not operating in the interests of money, it’s a non-profit organization (also called a non-government organization or NGO in some places) and that is a very, very different creature.

Logically, if a corporation wants to upgrade a portion of the equipment they use and service regularly, then in order to do that, they have to be able to justify the added cost of bringing that equipment in as well as the expenses of disposing anything made redundant by that upgrade.

In our case, these new “smart” meters are replacing existing meters. If Duke Power — which is indeed organized as a for-profit corporation and not an NGO — is to continue to turn a profit, it has to be able to absorb the cost of the new meters, as well as the cost of installing those meters (and labor is always the highest cost in any business) — *and* the cost of removing and disposing of the old meters as well. Given that the new meters have at least some sort of added feature-set in addition to what’s in the old one (as established above), and given the corporate nature of Duke Power, it is a reasonable conclusion to come to that whatever is in those meters is going to lead to a rate increase, because Duke has incurred at least SOME cost by purchasing the new meters — particularly since, as far as I’m aware, there’s no market for very used and very old electric meters anywhere around here, so Duke is likely to have to recycle the old ones — which, oddly enough, incurs costs on their end, because that’s how the recycling industry usually works.

To recap —
> the new meters, given the branding as “smart” meters, and given that
they’re receiving the dignity and fanfare of an awareness campaign from
Duke Power, reasonably must have added features that are not present in the
existing meters
> Duke Power is a corporation, and corporations exist to transfer money
from consumers to the owners and operators of said corporation, like any
other business
> added electronic complexity costs money, and thus the “smart” meters are going to be more expensive than the existing ones
> thus, it is reasonable to conclude that the new meters’ added feature-set
will allow Duke Power to offset the expenses incurred by swapping them in
for the old meters, by increasing costs overall to us consumers

Having said all of that — I encourage everyone to do their due diligence. If someone here unearths reputable and verifiable information that contradicts me, I would like to hear it. (Please cite your sources and verifications! For my part — everything here that isn’t simple common-sense derivative logic is readily-available public knowledge.) Let us *all* work together to see just what we’re dealing with, how bad it is, etc.

For my part — I have an elderly friend, and one of their children works for Duke Power as a lineman. I will be calling my friend in the next few days, and I will see if I can arrange to meet with the lineman relative and one of the new meters, so that I can take a hands-on look at it. I will also ask if they have a defective (etc) one that I could disassemble — I have a background in electronics and computers both (for the record, most of my knowledge is self-taught), and although I don’t have many friends, the ones I do have are equally technically-inclined, so if I can spend an afternoon or two with even a nonfunctional example, it shouldn’t be too difficult for me to work out what we’re dealing with — it’s a simple matter of working out what does what connected to what else where and how. I have all the tools I need — a bit-driver set, a multimeter, and the ability to look up datasheets and understand them.

I’ll keep everyone posted.

Chris

Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:37:11 -0500
From: Christopher Havel
Subject: Smart Meters