Silver Spring Networks is a company based in Redwood City, California. They are manufacturing the actual ‘smart’ meters that are going onto people’s homes and businesses all over the state. To their utility customers like PG&E, they boast about having the signal from the smart meters be so strong that it can transmit over varying topography- across valley and through mountains. The video above might seem like a utility executive’s dream, but to those of us concerned with health impacts from burgeoning EMF radiation, it is truly a dystopia.
It seems that Silver Spring manufactured the smart meters to be so powerful because a small minority of them might need to convey data through mountains. A case of building the church parking lot for Easter Sunday? Since most of suburbia isn’t in mountainous terrain, it’s good to know that the EMF signal is so strong it can penetrate the more vulnerable thin skulls protecting young brains of children sleeping on the other side of walls where sometimes more than two dozen meters are installed.
Virtually no public consultation has been carried out in advance of the program. No CEQA (environmental) review. Hardly any notification. Amazing what you can get away with when the form of pollution you’re inflicting on the population is silent and invisible.
SVNASM seems to have a great collection of ignorant flat-landers hopelessly looking for a new political cause. Smart Meters use incredibly low broadcast signal strengths compared to the ever common consumer wireless devices, mobile phones, and TV signals. To claim Smart Meters cause a health risk based on given data shows your incredible ignorance and a gross irresponsibility.
In regards to accuracy, Smart Meters are proven far more accurate than the legacy analog meters. As far as I can tell, SVNASM should stand for Self-proclaimed Victims Negligently Accusing Smart Meters.
Hi Chad, Thanks for your comment. Unfortunately you’re not entirely correct. Smart meters emit about 5x the strength of a cell phone. The data that we have- and it is sketchy as PG&E has not supplied complete information on EMF emissions- is that the ‘smart’ meters emit a burst of EMF every 45 seconds- more if your meter acts as a ‘repeater’ for up to 1000 other households. When Darbee claims that smart meters are only “13,000th” the strength of a cell phone, he is using time averaged data– and this is not being honest about peak emissions. If you have a bank of 30 of these things right next to a child’s bedroom that is not an insignificant amount of new radiation. We’re not saying that smart meters are in a league above other consumer electronic wireless devices. What we are saying is that FCC guidelines governing the safety of all of them is totally inadequate and not evidence based. The smart meters will introduce a significant level of new ‘electrosmog’ to our communities- including near those for whom this pollution causes health impacts and those who’d like to avoid this radiation. It’s not okay to roll out this program and force radiation onto those who don’t want it. They never asked us whether we wanted these new meters, and now that dozens of local govts are saying no, they’re saying ‘we don’t care.’
Yours is a typical snarky ad hominem comment of someone on the wrong side of this issue who knows your dream is crumbling. Good luck with your smart meter Chad.
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