Reply #40: The big carrot [View All]

The big carrot is provided by eliminating the need for meter reading; which is a dramatic cost reduction that is passed on to ratepayers.

Your discussion on "control" and "theoretical ...versus ...practical" is odd. If what you mean by "control" is more effective management, then yes a smart grid does result in more control. However to characterize that more effective management as "greater control over the individual" is simply horseshit.

If people can't pay their utility bills for legitimate reasons the solution to addressing the issue doesn't lie in inefficient management of the power grid, it lies in social and economic policies that work for all of us. To claim that the preferred solution to economic distress is to force people to live in fear of whether the power company will get around to shutting their power off this month or next is as close to Republican style slumlord management as anything I can imagine.

That is the proper focus for the short term - policies that evaluate the *decision* to shut off someone's power in light of economic circumstances. In the long term the changeover to a grid linking distributed renewable energy sources is the way that the individual actually can be empowered. To object to moving towards that goal based on a disingenuous argument meant to capitalize on populist anger is nothing more than a dishonest ploy to derail the move away from the structure for supplying energy that actually DOES result in great control over individuals by large corporations.

If such individual empowerment were really your concern, the very LAST technology you'd support is nuclear power for it is the ultimate in centralized control of an energy resource.

In light of that do you, in fact, reject nuclear power?