The Indybay says Protesters Halt Smart Meter Installation in Santa Cruz County

Heidi Bazzano, one of the protesters at 38th and Portola this morning, said, “there are so many problems with ‘smart’ meters. PG&E, the government, and any hacker worth his salt will know when you wake up, what appliances you use, when you go on vacation. The meters overcharge people, increase carbon emissions, expose us to EMF which is a confirmed carcinogen, and worst of all, we’re paying for them through hikes in our electric rates!”

“One of the protesters” is not exactly a qualified opinion. And their description of a hacker sounds a lot like the bogeyman or Santa Claus rather than a real threat. Watch out, he knows when you have been bad or good…this makes the protester sound uninformed. Confirmed carcinogen? Confirmed where?

Those who are electrically sensitive have reported that the intense bursts of radiation from ‘smart’ meters are amongst the worst they have ever experienced. People throughout the state have been reporting headaches, nausea, dizziness, sleep disruption and other health impacts after smart meters are installed. PG&E has declined to remove the new meters even though they are causing adverse health impacts, leading some local residents to flee the state and stay with relatives. Some have even been forced into homelessness, living in their cars with the hope that their smart meter will be removed.

The health risks still all sound theoretical. Some might correlate smart meters to general health issues but where are the audits, studies or tests that prove causation? A placebo test or control group study would be interesting. I can understand an opposition to meters after billing mistakes are caught by auditors. This problem was documented and proven. I do not understand the vague health argument.

Indybay does not offer insights. They link instead to StopSmartMeters, which gives only more vague references, laced with heavy-handed sarcasm.

PG&ESE: “A SmartMeter device transmits relatively weak radio signals, resembling those of many other devices we use every day, like cell phones and baby monitors. A major radio station, by contrast, usually transmits with 50,000 times as much power.”

English Translation: “A DumbMeter device transmits relatively weak radio signals compared with your microwave oven (which we initially asked the FCC for permission to install but we realized that humans who are cooked like hot dogs have trouble authorizing a debit account). We’ll conveniently neglect to mention that cell phone and baby monitor wireless technologies have been implicated in brain tumors and other nasty lethal ailments, trusting that the public’s ignorance of wireless impacts will hold out long enough for us to finish installation.”

First, this is a counter-point to the entire argument. It says the SmartMeter company is motivated to do no harm because they need consumers to be healthy enough to pay bills. That could be the end of their protest right there.

Second, the style reads to me like a story from The Onion. I might think the site is a hoax except for links to real news stories about City Councils considering whether to block installation.

Are Councils and local government driven by fear more than any evidence of risk? An article in SFGate says this is very likely.

Of all the complaints filed with PG&E, 16 percent came from customers who did not yet have a smart meter, Burt said. In other words, they couldn’t be reacting to a mechanical problem with the meter.

Another bit of evidence suggests that fears rather than malfunctions drive at least some of the complaints. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District gets more customer complaints about its own smart meters following newspaper or television stories about PG&E’s meters. That includes stories about the meters’ accuracy as well as complaints that the wireless devices could pose a health risk – an idea that PG&E strenuously rejects.

“Whenever we see a spike in stories about PG&E’s smart meters, we see a spike in complaints,” said SMUD spokesman Chris Capra.

What happens when there is a spike in stories about stories about PG&E smart meters?

The Cathode Corner site has a nice writeup of the design considerations for the Nixie Watch

As I pondered the perplexing problem of what to do with the back of the watch, I decided to study the mechanical watches I had lying around. They all seemed to have the same general design – a big turning with the strap lugs formed by punching out the material between them and from the sides of the watch. I had to approach it a bit differently, since I had an o-ring seal to get in the way of milling away material from the front. So I had the material milled from the rear. But I used the idea of turning the strap lugs, which is what gives it that watch-like look.

Although they figured out how to seal the case and make it attractive, battery life is still far below the paltry one-year that was planned. Hello, solar? What is that other wrist for anyway? Ironically it has a sensor built-in to save battery life by only displaying the time when viewed from a certain angle. Why not also generate energy from movement? This becomes a great example of how dependent a system is on energy, yet how little engineering is spent on solving the problem of input versus aesthetics.

Another massive spill, this one in Michigan. I remember process and security engineering used to look up to the oil and gas industry. Models for information security often borrowed concepts like fail-safe monitoring. Diagrams and images of oil rigs and pipelines were used to illustrate risk in terms of care and dilligence. The theory was the risk was so high for them, they had developed extensive controls. The BS7799 standard was even developed in a large part by oil companies, if I remember correctly, involved in the high-risk high-reward North Sea and Middle East operations.

The oil companies clearly have a very different public image these days. Oil spill update: State of emergency declared as 800,000 gallons of leaked oil begins flowing through Kalamazoo County.

County officials said they began an emergency response at about 6 p.m. Monday after news spread that a 30-inch oil pipeline in Marshall sprung a leak and released oil into the Talmadge Creek, which feeds into the Kalamazoo River. Houston-based Enbridge Energy Partners said the pipeline has been shut down but that did not happen before more than 800,000 gallons flowed into the creek.

The rate of flow must have been very high but a 30-inch pipeline still would take a while to lose almost a million gallons. Loss prevention has large body of scientific study for the oil and gas industry. What was the delay in detection and response? Maybe things have shifted so far now in the management of energy and risk that they could learn a thing or two from information security.

The BBC notes that diesel overtakes petrol car sales for first time:

Diesel sales made up 50.6% of the total in July, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said.

The sale of petrol cars dropped by almost a third in July compared with the same month a year earlier.

The article gives two main reasons in their analysis: company fleet restock and drivers buying more efficient engines. They say the tipping point came with diesel pump prices reaching the same as gasoline.

“They are buying despite the £1000 extra cost of diesel car, relying on the 15-20% greater fuel efficiency to leave them better off in the long run.”

According to the motoring organisation, a petrol car owner is now spending on average £123.85 a month on fuel compared with a diesel driver’s average spend of £103.28.

The popularity of diesel has been helped by a substantial fall in the price differential between petrol and diesel. In 2008 it was 13p per litre, wiping out any substantial cost savings a more fuel-efficient diesel engine might offer.

Last month, the difference at the fuel pumps was only 1.5p per litre.

I do not agree with this analysis. The price at the pump varies regularly and diesel is usually close in price. Diesel can be above or below gasoline with very little explanation or reason. Thus, unless people are buying cars on a moment’s notice, there is something else driving them (no pun intended) towards a diesel engine.

My guess is that the usual criteria like performance and prestige are a bigger factor. Why else would so many purchase cars that require premium fuel, which always costs more than regular? BMW, for example, markets their cars to drivers who are concerned with the time to go 0-60. The new diesel 3-series is as good or even better than the gasoline model. That is more likely a real tipping point, rather than just cost at the pump.

The aesthetics of a modern diesel also may be a factor: quieter, better-smelling, better-looking…all the things that used to be said about gasoline are now the reverse. You want an engine that purrs or has a low growl? Diesel comes that way by default. The high-pitched whine of gasoline is out.

Perhaps most important of all, however, is the efficiency measured in terms of convenience and lifestyle. A man who lives in San Francisco I recently met said that due to his first newborn he finally sold his Chevrolet Tahoe and bought a VW Jetta SportWagon with a diesel engine. His eyes grew wide and his hands gestured excitedly as he explained “I have to find a station and stop for gas half as often now — just once every other week. I get back so much time!” When was the last time you heard the father of a newborn talk about all the time they have found?

A quick calculation on productivity in America could make regulation go something like this: require all new pickup trucks to have engines that get 45mpg without any loss in towing power or capacity; this has been done before using diesel technology and could easily be done again. In some sense, it already has.

The funny thing about general technology/marketing evolution is that this 1980s vision of utility

has recently been turned into this (concept)

and this (reality)

There will be approximately 1.5 million pickups sold this year, which get a (questionable) publicized average of 22mpg. Take the 1.5 million gasoline engines filling up 20 gallon tanks every week and compare it to the same number of diesel engines filling up 15 gallon tanks every other week. Right there you eliminate 1 billion (975 million) gallons of fuel consumption in one year and that is just for new vehicles. Assuming 30 minutes is spent for each pump visit we also would recover 19.5 million hours of time for those new vehicles. With current pump prices ($0.20 difference between regular and diesel in America) that means $2.6 billion saved ($1742/yr per vehicle). If the time saved is mapped to $20/hr of productivity that is $585 million gained a year ($390/yr per vehicle).

US Savings in One Year: If All New Pickups Had Diesel Engines

In other words moving the pickup market to diesel would return approximately $2,000 per vehicle in time and cost per year. These calculations alone, however, will not be enough to move the majority of consumers, as noted above. When you add in performance and more prestige — being seen as macho, hip or cool with a diesel — you cover all the primary issues in the American market. On that note the recent fashion trend towards 80s nerdiness (led by the coming-of-age consumers born during that time) should make it easy to see how diesel could outsell gasoline even in the American market.