Day: August 5, 2009

Texas Instruments smart-meter marketing director Mark Buccini told SmartGridToday that,

Legislation is driving replacement [of electricity meters]. Perfectly good mechanical meters are being replaced [with smart meters]… In the past, a mechanical meter wasn’t replaced until it wore out. That changes the opportunity for us…

Buccini estimated that 500 million meters will be replaced in the next decade at a cost of $750 million per year — that’s $15,000 per meter change.

That’s just the beginning. Buccini said that “adjacent markets” — i.e., in-home displays, programmable thermostats, direct response (DR) units, distributed generation and plug-in vehicle technology] almost doubles the market to $1.4 billion per year.

Smart meters and adjacent technology are little more than a way for the government to monitor your electricity use and then to ration electricity to you via your local utility. It is an expensive and needless insult to Americans.

The Obama administration — via the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) — issued an economic analysis of Waxman-Markey concluding that the bill will cause electricity prices to increase only slightly through 2020.

While we’re still reviewing the report, here are a couple things you ought to know about it:

• The EIA report appears to show merely that if no true CO2 control is put in place, electricity prices won’t increase. But as soon as true CO2 control is implemented electricity prices could more than double.
• The report is chock full of demonstrably faulty assumptions and misleading economics. Assumptions include that nuclear power and carbon capture and storage are easily and inexpensively implemented on a large scale. The misleading economics portion includes the notion that Congress can impose more than $6 trillion of annual costs on energy production and use, and energy users won’t notice.

The real loser here is the EIA — America’s source of energy data — which is squandering its reputation in order to advance President Obama’s agenda.