The New Electric Utility Smart Meters Are Institutionalized Robbery

The 2009 stimulus project spent $3.4 billion to install 18 million “smart meters” in homes and small businesses. That was the first baby step. These devices go on the famous principle of “charge for gasoline so people use it more efficiently.”

Commercial electricity customers pay a two-part electric bill, one for usage and one for demand. The usage part is what residential customers pay (unless they have a smart meter). The demand part doubles the bill, and it’s based on the peak usage for each month.

When you come back home from a weekend at the beach in July and crank up the AC to the max, run the clothes washer, take baths, and run the electric water heater to provide all that hot water – your demand zooms up, and that peak is what the utility uses to charge you for the peak part of the bill for the entire month.

The “Energy Efficiency” part simply means that people are forced to pay more attention to how they use electricity and when. The “Reliability” part is that the utilities are guaranteed a reliable income even as modern homes become more energy efficient.

Smart Meter Rips Off Stupid Customers

Soon every American will have one of these wonderful “smart meters,” and we’ll all be paying twice what we are now for our electricity. Hurray.

The worst part is that we’re paying for all this. Why should the federal government pay $188 for each smart meter installed when the utility ends up charging twice as much for the same amount of electricity we use?

That means the utility company gets an extra $200 a month or $2400 a year for each of those 18 million homes with smart meters equals an extra income of $34 billion a year.

I hope they had cold cereal for breakfast.