Separating Industry Fiction from Facts

(Originally published on EMFSafetyNetwork.org)

The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC), an industry group, has published a video “Separating the Facts from the Fiction about Smart Meter”.  PG&E, SCE, SDG&E, BC Hydro, PEPCO, BGE, FPL, as well as other utility companies and Smart Meter manufacturers like Landis and Gyr, Itron, Silver Springs Networks, GE, Aclara, are SGCC membersAffiliate members are utility regulators like Public Utility Commissions from California, Colorado, Texas, and environmental groups like EDF and NRDC.

This video attempts to counter legitimate Smart Meter complaints and serious problems. They start by saying there’s misinformation about Smart Meters floating about the internet (displaying a panic button) and they plan to set the record straight. “Let’s get down to business” is a key introductory phrase.

Promoting Smart Meters IS their business.

  • Industry fiction: Smart Meters don’t know how you’re using power
  • FACTSmart Meters “…can be used to pinpoint the use of most major household appliances. Such detailed information about the in-home activities of electricity customers can thus be used to piece together a fairly detailed picture of an individual’s daily life or routine.”SmartGridPrivacy  See also: Privacy-Problems-Inherent-in-the-Smart-Grid
  • Industry fiction: “Most of the time your meter is idle”
  • FACT: One PG&E Smart Meter can transmit up to 190,000 pulses a day. PG&E’s Big Confession
  • Industry fiction: “Your power company has kept your data private for decades.”
  • FACT: PG&E released names, email addresses and private online conversations they gathered by deception to the media. They redacted PG&E and third party names, and emails and left open customer data, at the same time claiming privacy was a great value to them. PG&E’s spying may cost them
  • Industry fiction:”Smart Meters allow you to make choices that limit your bills.”
  • FACT: Over-billing complaints have been reported widely after Smart Meters are installed. Customers in Bakersfield CA were so outraged about overcharging they filed a class action lawsuit against PG&E. See complaints. See also:PG&E admits billing errors, offers scanty refund
  • Industry fiction: Science doesn’t support the claim that RF causes cancer
  • FACT: The World Health Organization classified RF radiation as a 2b Carcinogen, same as DDT and lead.
  • Industry fiction: A household radio transmits RF
  • FACT: A household radio receives RF, it is not an RF transmitter.
  • Industry fiction: Smart Meters create less exposure to RF radiation than a microwave, cell phone, wi-fi.
  • FACT: Daniel Hirsch, a UC researcher, has calculated that smart meters expose you to more than 100 times the full body, cumulative exposure as a cell phone. Daniel Hirsch report
  • Industry fiction: “Even if you cozied up to a Smart Meter all day, it would require you to snuggle up to one for 375 years before it would equal the exposure of having a daily 15 minute cell phone call over the course of one year.”
  • FACT: Smart Meters can exceed FCC safety guidelines (Sage reports)
  • FACT: Smart Meters can violate FCC conditions for installment
  • Industry fiction: Read the Hobbit instead of worrying that the” Smart Meter is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse that will wreak havoc on your life”
  • FACT: Lawsuits are being filed against Smart Meters in several states, California, Maine, Hawaii, Texas, Illinois and more. Utility Regulators in Maryland, Illinois and Pennsylvania are investigating Smart Meter related fires.

Smart Meters are designed to work in a mesh network, transmitting radio frequency (RF) radiation pulses from home to home.  If too many customers refuse, the mesh system can fail. Having to provide customers a choice has become a serious problem for the industry. The industry, with support from regulators, are penalizing customers for non-compliance by charging them to opt out. The Smart Grid program which was initiated by the federal government, was designed to be offered, but not forced on customers.

Environmental and activist groups are fighting smart meters in states across the US, Canada, Australia, and England. Join a group in your area.

Initial comments on the video indicate Smart Consumers aren’t buying the industry propaganda:

“The most ridiculous aspect is that they call themselves “Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative” yet they’re 100% INDUSTRY! If you needed iron clad evidence of intent to deceive, I don’t think you could do much better than that.”

“This video reminds me of a video I just watched on youtube titled “Cigarettes are good for you.flv” a must see!”

“Mislabeled as science, this video is the stupidest thing I have heard or seen.”

“Wow, what a bunch of lies! I sure hope people see through this garbage!”

This entry was posted in California, Cell phones, Citizen rebellion, CPUC, FCC, Federal Energy Act of 2005, Federal Government, legal issues, PG&E, Privacy, radio-frequency radiation, Safety, Smart Grid. Bookmark the permalink.

10 Responses to Separating Industry Fiction from Facts

  1. Redi Kilowatt says:

    Wow, very confusing.
    The first statement by the utilities about the SmartMeters not knowing what you are using your power for is 100 percent correct. No electric meter is capable of anything except for totaling up cumulative usage fed through the meter, even the advanced meters that customers must pay about $4000.00 for (that includes required service upgrades) used for electric vehicle charging (E9) and the advanced E6 TOU meters used for bi-directional measuring for solar can only measure the total cumulative usage of electrical power.
    That arbitrary statement about appliances measured individually is not true, I don’t know who started the myth but it sure caught on in some uninformed circles.
    About the statement that your power company has kept your data private for decades
    is true. The internet has not been around for decades, and it was only within the last year that the utilities have made the previous cumulative usage available online to the customers with a “my account” or “green button” app for your smart phones.
    If anyone is worried about someone hacking into your internet account with PG&E and seeing how much power you used up to the previous 24 hours, simply don’t sign up for such a program-problem solved.
    If you think marketers are tracking your purchases, never use credit or debit cards, pay with cash only and there is no possible way that any marketers will ever be able to track your purchases.
    The utility statement about SmartMeters enable customers to make choices that limit your bills is false. But, remember that the whole automated meter program was based on that industry propaganda. The real reason for the automated meter reading was to eliminate meter reading jobs, and to trick people into signing up for voluntary time differentiated pricing schemes. Those schemes will not save any energy at all, but will enable the utility corporations to jack up your rates up to $1.20 per kilowatt/hour during peak times when all the commercial and government users need extra power for air conditioning. No doubt about it, the utilities are very worried about overloading the power grid now, and they think that they can trick residential customers into using less energy with price gouging schemes. That is where the utilities are dead wrong.
    So, there are lies and garbage being put out by all sides, not just the utilities.

  2. Mary S says:

    Along this same vein, we stacked another SGCC disinformation piece against our independent research in Maryland and posted it at:

    http://marylandsmartmeterawareness.org/smart-meter-truths/6-smart-meter-myths-and-facts/

    I don’t understand how they can continue to spread inaccurate data, even though it’s been repeatedly shown to be inaccurate. One of the most egregious examples being the number of times smart meters emit RF. Videos, refereed readings, admission by utilities and PSCs and yet still they tell us it’s inactive 99.9% of the time, when reality demonstrates it emits several thousands per day. Let’s not even get started on the collector meters. They can continue to ‘pass the buck’ saying that it’s what the manufacturers told them. Where’s the accountability??

    • Paul H says:

      They can do it because they have been instructed to do so. People have become demoralized and selfish. If it doesn’t affect them then it doesn’t seem to matter.
      They don’t understand that their loved ones are probably going through problems from this disaster right now. They would have been the good teacher in the Milgram Experiment.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8olVHKgIBXc

  3. Mia Nony says:

    While the issue of surveillance & cost is debated much more than your financial well being is being usurped. As savvy economist Erik Anderson informs Raif Mair on Youtube, these computer devices are part of the green masked Enronization of the entire energy & water essential services enchilada, right under our noses. Corporations are breaking laws left, right & centre, while socializing all costs & losses but privatizing all profits. Who but us is there to stop them by using or losing the laws created to protect us?
    When utilities & government are hand in glove, that is fascism. Just ask Mussolini. We are witnessing criminal use of our taxes to transfer wealth, to scour out until empty our personal holdings/savings, while using our money to construct a lethal weapons global system.
    Surely survival should be the first priority?
    In fact what else should matter besides the fact that (in the case of public utilities) your own property is stolen & in its place is installed & locked down a weapons delivery system device?
    Smart grid nodes like Medusas & routers are designed to “go the distance”. They don’t come to a screeching halt at your service panel/circuit box. Cumulatively these grid nodes enable fully illegal weaponized frequencies, issuing from what they & we continue to mislabel a “meter”.
    The trick is to not lose focus & get sidetracked into debate about how much the device is overcharging. It will charge & exceed all limits, that is a given.
    Meanwhile the urgent issue is electromagnetic frequencies which are inducing every inch of everything biological. The ecosystem upon which we utterly depend is under assault, electrically inducing, in fact targeting, loved ones, children pets, birds, bats, bees, butterflies, precipitating slow motion electrical failure while lining the pockets of telecom industries & pharma corporations as well as doctors who have not taken continuing educational upgrade credits for EMF induced multiple symptoms of physical decline, & who continue to fail to realize that microwave sickness is not only lethal, it’s not new, it’s approx. 80 years old.
    It seems key to stay focused, to challenge the illegality itself of using frequencies to depolarize all creatures’ nerves & muscles & to forcibly flip the switches for bodies, the nerves, on & off billions of times a second like a strobe light.
    Surely the aim of corporate propaganda is to divide & rule, is to distract & redirect & blur boundaries, to lie, trick & deceive us into debating irrelevancies about whether frequency graphing exists, all the while falling into the trap of aping industry lingo by calling this frequency delivery device a “meter”.
    According to Weights and Measures law, any energy usage measurement device must measure real time measurements.
    This device does not do that.
    It’s running on estimation software, it’s not a “meter”. Test it.
    Go off grid after tracking how the device runs. Shut off all electricity for a time. Observe the “meter. We have found it often speeds even faster. It is no different than the spaceship computer Hal in 2001, “Sorry Dave, I can’t do that”.
    It is a computer locked on to a UL approved base the property owner owns. It is often installed by some unqualified youthful temp employee, “No Experience Necessary”, who is “charged” with messing with your entire electrical system under hot load while paid piece work, fast jamming into a live base bendable prongs, which could arc, pit, corrode, & delay a spark ignition of the static field around this device, all without any requirement for a forensic post install arc assessment. On they move, bonuses over 30 installations, incentive based speed of installations, every last one done under live load.
    So what have we got so far?
    Trespass, refusal of transparency, illegal contractual default, misuse of easement “rights”, theft, demolition of property, intimidation, protection racketeering sans protection,violation of 4th Amendment/Chart of Rights & Freedoms, property rights, potential arson, plus.. locked on enabler of weaponized frequencies.
    Isn’t it time to debate something besides one more electronic deception system, a Diebold type non transparent system’s penchant for drastic over billing, deception which is a corporate given?
    All biology is becoming daily more frequency induced & navigationally & cognitively impaired?
    BTW?
    In BC it has been legally established that we own the analog meters they steal & destroy.
    Citizens are issuing registered letters of Notices of Contractual Default right now. Hydro is being separately legally challenged for its lack of the authority to implement any of this, let alone to steal and demolish privately owned analogue meters (hence the Notice of Contractual Default.
    Stop being deceived into focusing on one single device of many. A Medusa cell relay on your house covers 125 square miles. A smart “meter” covers 21 square miles. And then there are the routers/ aggregators /collector hubs. Not to mention the smart towers. Add up the cumulative frequencies of all nodes of the grid, not just what one node’s frequencies are capable of doing. Inside flammable plastic housing sans UL approval is remotely reprogrammable software able to overwrite, disappear its own tracks & actions, able to register as “usage” its own self generated fields, able to pull off illegal non real time usage as it overwrites its own virtual “estimates” of “usage”. But more to the point it uses weapons grade frequencies to steal your remaining assets. And once they are gone, who needs you? Certainly not a rapacious corporate entity.

    Letter by JF
    re FortisBC AMI CPCN,
    Project No. 3698682 –

    CEC Clarification Comments on Community Input Sessions

    From: JF
    Date: September 21, 2012
    To: Commission.Secretary@bcuc.com

    Subject: FortisBC AMI CPCN, Project No. 3698682 – CEC Clarification Comments on Community Input Sessions

    I am new to this whole Intervener role and am unfamiliar and not particularly comfortable with the cumbersome administrative process.
    One thing I do know is that this whole smart meter, meshed-grid and electromagnetic radiation (EMR) subject is of such great – even historical – importance to us all, that the public MUST be given every opportunity to see, hear and understand exactly what is going on.

    I personally have a long military background much of it spent in SIGINT (signals intelligence) and EW (electronic warfare), including two years in Canada’s National Defense Headquarters, where I served as an Electronics Warfare Officer in the Directorate of Electronic Warfare for two years.
    I have an entirely different and a very real appreciation for the undeniable dangers that accrue from any pulsed wireless EMR-emitting technology, including those which electric utilities and the telecom industry continue to impose on our uninformed, unsuspecting and unprotected society.

    Certainly, within the military intelligence community, at least, it has long been known that both the former U.S.S.R. and the U.S. militaries have experimented for more than 60 years – and continue to do so – with the non-thermal low-intensity, long term effects of pulsed microwave EMR on humans!
    It is further known that both Russia and the U.S. have developed an arsenal of microwave weapons capable of disabling, maiming and even killing humans … plus they have pulsed microwave weapons capable of mind control.
    Of the specific frequencies the Soviet’s in particular experimented with and whose lethality they now fully understand one stands out: 2.4 GHz! as this is the very same frequency used in today’s wi-fi routers, DECT phones and the ZigBee radios inside every Smart Meter. Significantly, too, the Soviets’ effective radiated power (ERP) was estimated to be lower than that currently permitted by both Health Canada’s or the FCC’s “Guidelines”!

    History has been written; the de-classified government documents are there to be seen; the Internet is full of evidence, which is unassailable. No informed person can question that microwave weapons exist or that the long term, low intensity EMR emitted by pulsed microwave devices are injurious to not just humans but to all life forms. So, let’s make absolutely certain these hearing are open to the public – and, just as importantly – to the media.

    JF
    Retired Captain, Canadian Armed Forces (ex-Royal Canadian Navy)

    • Paul H. says:

      Nice comment, it hit the nail on the head here! The smart grid is nothing more than a weapon coming through the back door with ecological efforts written on the front. It’s a true killer wreaking havoc with every living thing. G3-PLC is the delivering pulsed low level electromagnetic weapon and will probably wipe out entire populations. No one will know the cause, just like the birds and animals dying at the same time instantaneously. It’s all just a big “mystery”.

      Smart Grid=Agenda 21’s Trojan Horse.

  4. Mia Nony says:

    PS
    Re the letter from the electronic & microwave warfare specialist
    JF = Jerry Flynn.

  5. Pingback: Separating the Facts from the Fiction about Smart Meter | Sedona Smart Meter Awareness

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