21 Replies to “This Is Your Power Grid On Windoze”

  1. Here in Ontario, many of us have noted that especially in rural areas, Hydro One has been installing these devises first at low consumption customers while the big users dairy farms remain with the old meters.
    I can see using these things to locate grow ops stealing power….
    Oh well, being one of the freaks who reads their meter daily—it is much faster and easier to read.
    This is helpful because they only read the meter 4 times a year and bill monthly based upon an estimate—-which frequently is wild. I tipped one associate of this and he read his meter and called HYDRO ONE—-no refund but he wasn’t billed for 8 months….
    Thing I haven’t divined yet—most times a green light glows at night—-then occassionally a yellow/orange light and at times red—is this low voltage??? I have my UPS bleep frequently—

  3. Computerized,interconnected,devices with NO safety systems, forced into every home by gov’t edict. If I was hacker I’d fall to my knees weeping in gratitude.

  6. They’re planning on installing the smart meters in our small town.
    I think the idea of paying rates based on demand is valid, however, until the local utility can demonstrate that their smart meters are protected from those with malicious intent I will pass…unless, of course, I’m forced to commit. Then we’ll see what happens.
    DaWG
    A resident of America’s Hat.©

  7. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that if dozey-meters can be hacked then they could be triggered to understate power consumption back to the utility…hence free power for grow-ops?
    Chance for Canada to lead in a whole new cottage industry similar to satellite TV for free.

  8. The vulnerability seems to be as a result of being able to remotely upgrade software in the meter. This results in a very insecure system and I wouldn’t want a meter like this for my house. I’d also be very concerned about errors in data transmission as I suspect data is transmitted over the power lines which are inherently very noisy data channels.
    If the smart meter did monitoring only, I’d have no problems with it. Having the ability to be externally controlled makes it very dangerous and I’m sure we’ll see examples of pranksters tapping into a power line to send shutoff commands to power meters of a whole neighborhood sometime soon.

  9. Great, your house can be knocked off the grid by punks in Mum’s basement. In China. Don’t these friggin’ retards ever learn -anything-? Voting machines ring a bell?
    Luckily you can fix that funky meter problem with two pieces of aluminum bar stock, assuming there’s still power at the pole. No hope if the punks knock out the sub stations.
    Good thing I’ve got my generator ready to rumble. Propane tank on order!

  10. Aaron: Dear Alex, what do you think those things run on? VAX?
    Sorry, couldn’t resist. I miss our old VAX (an 11/780 and 11/750) running 4.0BSD, and later 4.2BSD. Those were the days, the days when we got to know the DEC IT guy personally, what with his almost daily visits to replace a faulty PC board with another faulty PC board.
    That was then, this is now. When I saw Kate’s post, I immediately thought of one of my recent trips to withdraw money from a Bank of Montreal ATM. I began my withdrawal; meanwhile, another fellow entered to use the machine next to mine. He paused, raised an eyebrow, so I looked across and there was an error message on his screen indicating some sort of catastrophe (guess what the OS was — and it wasn’t 4.2BSD). We looked at each other and we both laughed nervously. He mentioned that he was going to keep money in his mattress.

  11. Don’t look a gift horse in the Mouth, about 20 years ago, PSE&G in New Jersey offered the twistee bulbs & Smart Meters (before deregulation) I signed up & paid a lower K/W rate for the next 10 years… I was commuting to NYC, my wife was also working, and was not home until 7 PM… We just cranked up the AC and didn’t see any downside except lower Bills.
    They assume incorrectly that people are wasting Power (Programming thermostats have been around for ~20 years)

  12. …Meanwhile in the home of politically correct homage to AGW and sustainability:
    “Weather supercomputer used to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters
    The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30 million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters.
    The massive machine – the UK’s most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory – It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power more than 1,000 homes.”
    http://tinyurl.com/n2oggq

  13. Exactly Phil …. the assumption that average households are wasting power is the strawman for almost every new imposition that the Utilities heap on us AND the excuse given by the political tools who ride this bandwagon.
    The utilities simply want to have consumers cover more of the cost for commercial power users.
    Running those cubilce farms in downtown areas aint cheap!

  15. Imagine, if you will…
    It is a regular February, -25C. Al-Queda, seeing an opportunity, taps one of its cells in Canada, full of radicalised Computer Engineering students, “Shut down the Grid!” CanWest shows the supplied mask-man video, explaining that Canada is now paying for its incursion into Afghanistan, as hundreds of thousands of Canadians start freezing to death. The good people of Ontario cry out, “But, but, have we tried talking with them? Don’t they realize we are innocent because we are trying to save the planet! Somebody help us! Our Green safety bubble is collapsing!” Western Canada springs into action to help, ’cause even dumb kin is still kin, but there is only so much computer code that can be written in 12 hours. The population density of Canada makes a sharp move to the West, and the world is forever changed…
    Stupid Buggy Power Meters!

  16. Not sure about the rest of Canada, but chimpy mcidiot and his merry band of thieving libranos plan to use the “smart meter” as their gateway to controlling the temperature in our homes.
    Don’t believe me? They have even included this plan in the high school curriculum.
    To this point, these envirojerkoffs have been a mild irritant…….try to control my furnace and it is game on. SWAT team sounds about right.

  17. dolt mcguilty was given the choice of 2 types of time-of-day hydro meters. the ‘smart’ kind or a simpler version that worked like those old IBM clocks that took a signal off the outlet and reset the time once a day. it would work by slowing down or speeding up the little wheel depending on the time. shucks, it even worked with daylight savings.
    naturally he chose the ‘smart’ one with the biggest lobby pushing it.

  18. Here in Dallas, the local power delivery company bought a bunch of smart meters – but they didn’t wait for the Public Utility Commission to finalize the software requirements. The meters weren’t compatible, so new ones had to be ordered. And – you guessed it – the cost of the “bad” meters is being passed along to customers, along with the cost of the “good” ones. (No one has addressed the fact that the smart meters eliminate the need for meter readers, resulting in a savings to the utility company – after all, that’s money in their pockets; only costs are assessed to customers, not *gasp* savings…..)
    And now, with software whose security level is on a par with Windows, we’ll probably have the privilege of having our power maliciously cut off by hackers and/or having to cough up yet another round of payments for new meters or reprogramming. All in the name of “efficiency” and “cost cutting”………….
    Is there a “Mac guy” for power grids???????

  19. “The rush to upgrade has only increased in the months following passage of Barack Obama’s stimulus package, which reserved $4.5bn for smart-grid spending. To qualify, however, utilities must meet aggressive deadlines that have only accelerated companies’ upgrade plans.”
    In my neck of the woods:
    “SMUD, the state Department of General Services and California State University, Sacramento, are hoping to land a chunk of that funding. Together, they plan to apply for as much as $100 million to develop a regional smart-grid demonstration project.”
    Fill the trough, and they will come.

  20. OMMAG:
    I don’t think we intentionally wasted power, but (I share a bungalow with another guy) we decided to try to cut down on power use this year. It wasn’t huge decisions; we started washing more clothes in cold water, we turned the thermostat up a notch or two in the summer, made sure we turned lights off, etc. With these minimal privations, we were quite happily surprised to see our electricity usage down by 15% from last year.
    I’m not advocating hair shirts for anyone. We still use computers, TV’s, microwaves, etc. every day. But I think a lot of people would be surprised by how much less power they would use if they made a few small changes.

  21. I have to snicker at the austere naïveté of lemmings that fall in lock step with the corporate-technocrat elite’s sustainability farce.
    Elemental generated electrical energy is carbon neutral, clean and totally renewable, fully sustainable and presently in no short supply. We sell billions of gW/hrs to the US grid and still have unused capacity. As for ‘waste’, the utilities who rate gouge you [for their less than stellar transmission service] dissipate 40-60% of the energy they transmit through line leakage in faulty and ancient lines and equipment.
    Similarly, the core concept of ‘saving’ water is fraudulent as it is the second most abundant element on earth and it ain’t going anywhere. It is the original recyclable. In Canada our landscape is surrounded by it in lakes rivers – it even falls from the sky and piles up for 5 months of the year. There’s so much of it it floods out homes when it spills out of its holding ditch every year. Most of the ‘problem’,once again, is with water utilities/authorities who have gouged their rates for years and put profits into external investment rather than into the insufficient water holding structures and leaking distribution infrastructure.
    Neither EE or water are ‘scarce’ enough to warrant the profiteering and rationing regimes going on over manufactured supply shortage hysteria.
    So; what I’m seeing is the elite seeding guilt among the peons – esentially blaming them for using the inefficient systems they rely on, then gouging them further with guilt and shortage charges on abundant commodities. Great racket if you can get into it.
    We should actually be protesting and refusing unwarranted rate increases and rationing of abundant commodities rather than acting like cowed slaves to a controlled market system that has been abusing us too long. Then again that would take some passion for freedom and self worth, and that seems to be mostly bred out of Canadians by 30 years of conditioning in self loathing subordinating socialism.

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