Did you know that in England in the Depression they had coin operated gas meters in the "poor" parts of their cities? As their economy recovered after the War, income increased, gas supplies increased, electricity came of age, and the meters faded away. But they had originated to maximize profit, not to save gas. Smart metering is a nice band-aid technology, much like device energy efficiency gains. But population growth is not static, and the amount of energy use self-restraint people generally exhibit is very limited. So either energy production increases, per-capita income goes back up, population decreases, or we'll quite predictably face another energy crunch.

The main advantage to an engineered crisis is that a panicked, at-present largely nontechnically aware public will embrace virtually any proposed solution. The best Business game strategy is to have your most lucrative solution prepared and waiting. Oh, but I forgot -- we won't have a crisis because our (also largely nontechnically aware) Legislative bodies are forward looking and will have anticipated this and proactively taken measures to preclude any crisis by mandating and facilitating new source generation & distribution... that would fall in the realm of looking out for the Public Interest, sort of what they're paid to do.

A technological society functions solely because of the existence of cheap energy. Cheap energy allows individual productivity to exceed the raw "survival" productivity level. Cheap energy frees up an individuals time, and allows them to engage in other, not-directly-survival-related pursuits. This results in lots of cool side effects, like medicine and chemistry and science and public education...to name a few.

Metering energy to reduce revenue billing collection costs and allow for further Power Distribution workforce reductions to accelerate the accretion of wealth to an even more select few is not in my book a formula for societal success. It is however an indicator that we've strayed fairly far afield from having a sane, just, sustainable society. When people are so ill educated and fiscally irresponsible that they cannot reliably pay their power bills in a country awash in energy, or they cannot find compensating employment that affords them reliable access to energy in the USA, Houston we have a problem. One that a hi-tek wind-up energy meter won't address.

Mitch Smith
Test Technician

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