EDITOR,
The latest B.C. Liberal smart-meter rip-off is for the most part going unreported and without public debate.
The billion dollars of smart meters were secretly contracted to a friend of government without a proper bidding process, and without consideration in our provincial legislature.
In her Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) article Joyce Nelson points out: "The truth is that smart meters aren't exactly necessary for a smart grid," but for technical and economic reasons, they're being pushed on us by multinational corporations.
Just what those technical and economic reasons are, even the business consultants have been hard-pressed to explain. "The business case for rolling out expensive smart-meter networks is often thin," noted a March 2011 report from global research/consulting firm Ovum, so utilities need to "investigate alternative revenue generation from their smart meter infrastructure."
They key reason for the smart meters is huge profits for the information and communications technology (ICT) sector: IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Oracle, Itron, etc. In other words, the reason for smart meters is to sell smart meters, and then smart appliances.
Within the appliance manufacturing industry, the "smart appliance" sector is in fierce competition with "energy-efficient" appliance makers for sector dominance -much like the competition between Betamax and VHS back in the 1980s. Energy-efficient appliances don't need the smart meter to function, but smart appliances do.
According to a recent report from Sage Environmental Consultants in California, in order for smart meters to control energy usage in the home (rather than just convey billing data), "the consumer must (next) be willing to purchase and install power transmitters" for each new smart appliance to communicate with the smart meter. A typical kitchen and laundry may have a dozen power transmitters in total.
So making the smart meter mandatory is an obvious boost for smart-appliance makers like General Electric and the whole ITC industry.
B.C. Hydro has awarded the first smart meter contract to Corix Utilities. One of the two owners of Corix is CAI Capital Management, whose senior advisor is David Emerson, executive chair of B.C. Transmission Corp. and chair of the Premier's Economic Advisory Council.
The other owner of Corix is the British Columbia Investment Management Corp.
So quite apart from minor health hazards, more serious considerations of privacy invasion and future "hacking" of the "smart grid" noted by B.C. computer expert David Chalk and others, not to mention the inevitability of time-of-day billing, of course we should be refusing smart meters until the whole issue is properly examined by the next government of B.C.
You can refuse a smart meter. Go to tinyurl.com/StopSmartMeterSign
Lyle Fenton
Squamish
