Smart meters stir debate

Dec 25 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Eric D. Lawrence Detroit Free Press

Pauline Holeton has a message for local utility workers -- keep your hands off her electric meter.

Holeton, 61, of Shelby Township is part of a group opposed to wireless digital electric meters, called smart or advanced meters, that DTE Energy, Consumers Energy and utilities across the country are using to replace the traditional home electric meters.

About 600,000 meters are expected to have been installed in Oakland County, Harsens Island and Grosse Ile by the first quarter of 2012.

Consumers Energy in September announced a $48-million contract with Milwaukee-based Corix Utilities U.S.A. to install 1.8 million smart electric meters in the Michigan utility's service area.

"We will not have it on our home," Holeton said, noting that she has posted signs saying not to install a smart meter and has a padlock on her analog meter. "This is the most important thing of our lives. This is a very serious, important issue."

Despite utility company assurances, Holeton and others cite a host of potential concerns covering everything from their health to worries about Big Brother. They fear utilities would be able to monitor what devices they use in their homes and for how long, and they believe such information would be vulnerable to hacking. DTE Energy spokesman Scott Simons said the utility would, in general, know only what an entire household's energy usage is.

The group has helped convince Shelby Township, Royal Oak, Brighton, Warren, Southfield, Rochester and Rochester Hills to pass resolutions urging further study and a moratorium on smart meter installations.

But the activists also want an opt-out provision for a program that could eventually affect every home in the region. Neither DTE nor Consumers Energy currently has such a provision, although Consumers Energy Smart Grid Communications Coordinator Roger Morgenstern said the company is reviewing the idea ahead of its first installations, slated for August in the Muskegon area.

"We believe the smart meters that we're going to be installing are safe," said Morgenstern, noting that they more than meet Federal Communications Commission guidelines on radio frequency emissions. But "we understand there are concerns."

Smart meters have been promoted as a crucial component of so-called smart-grid technology designed to give consumers real-time information about their energy usage and how to reduce it, allow utilities to immediately pinpoint outages, and eliminate meter readers because that function would be handled remotely.

The devices are similar in appearance to a traditional meter, except for the digital read-out. Simons noted that the technology, which uses radio waves to communicate with utility companies, has been used for years in products such as microwave ovens, cell phones and baby monitors.

"It would take the typical homeowner a thousand years to get the same amount as a typical cell phone user in a month," Simons said of the radiation exposure from a smart meter.

Opponents of smart meters, however, dispute that, pointing to comments by Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz who contends radiation exposure from smart meters is 100 times that of cell phones.

Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's energy program, said he has not seen a compelling case that smart meters are a health danger, although "I think some scientific peer-reviewed analysis would be appropriate."

Instead, he said the installation programs that target every household in a region are the problem. He compared the process to someone buying the most expensive smartphone when he or she only intends to make phone calls.

Most households, he said, would never recover the energy efficiency savings to justify the initial smart meter expense, which he estimated at $250-$450 apiece.

"Simply installing smart meters does not make a household better armed to be more efficient," he said.

Simons, the DTE spokesman, said customers would not see a direct cost, at least from the initial installations. He said, "It's pretty much just a matter of time before all of our customers get them."

Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com