"PG&E to Roll Out Carmel's SmartMeter Opt-Out Policy Statewide" by News Blog

News Blog

PG&E to Roll Out Carmel's SmartMeter Opt-Out Policy Statewide

April 25, 2011

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is extending a temporary, no-cost opportunity for customers to opt out of SmartMeters, PG&E's wireless technology that records electric and natural gas usage electronically. Based on a temporary opt-out option successfully piloted in Carmel, the company is making the option available to all customers statewide Monday.

"They’ve taken the compromise I worked out for Carmel, and they’re now applying it across the entire state," says Councilman Jason Burnett. "PG&E has in many ways botched the roll out of smart meters, but I think this is a good step."

In March, PG&E agreed to allow Carmel residents to delay SmartMeter installation by signing on to a delay list. The delay list for installations "came as a direct result of our really productive dialogue [with Burnett]," says PG&E Spokesperson Jeff Smith.

This option is a temporary solution as the Public Utilities Commission considers PG&E's proposed "radio off" option, its long-term fix to what will eventually be a universal SmartMeter upgrade for all customers. (Customers will have to pay for the radio off alternative; PG&E's proposal, still awaiting PUC approval which could take several months, is for a $270 up-front fee plus $14 monthly charges, or $135 up front and $20 monthly charges. PG&E expects about 100,000 customers to select to pay for the opt-out.)

This temporary opt-out option comes as controversy around the wireless technology and alleged health impacts continues to flare up in public comment at city and county meetings, and at least two dozen cities have issued bans on SmartMeter installations, among them Watsonville, Santa Cruz and Monterey.

Burnett, who is personally supportive of SmartMeters and "excited about the technology," says he expects the delay list to reduce some of the controversy. As to how he leveraged one 5,000-resident town across PG&E's entire service area, "I just picked up the telephone," Burnett says.

I don't understand what the big, screaming deal about the smart-meters is. They put out the same kind of radio signals that your wifi router does. They don't put out alpha, beta, OR gamma radiation.

The backlash against this technology is motivated by the same incorrect presumptions about wireless technology as the idea that cell-phones can give you brain cancer. (they can't, by the way.) The waves are radiologially incapable of causing cancer. Even assuming that your cell phone, or smart meter, or radio set, for that matter, can put out any amount of radiation (which, I'll say again, THEY CAN'T); the amount of radiation that you would be exposed to would be smaller than the amount of radiation that you accumulate as a result of UV radiation, or receiving a chest X-ray, or flying in an airplane (each flight would most likely equal a couple thousand times the amount of imaginary radiation that a smart meter could be capable of generating).

People still have the right to act on their irrational presumptions, but as someone who studies this sort of thing, it sort of annoys me when people draw conclusions about technology without doing the proper research first.

I don't know if smart meters are a health threat or not, but I'm convinced they are a security risk. The potential for hackers to intercept or disrupt smart meter communications has been given little attention compared to the health concerns.

But consider that anyone with a radio receiver and a laptop can intercept smart meter transmissions and because there's no physical entry point, there's absolutely no way on earth for PG&E to know who is monitoring their network. Hackers can thus take their sweet time decoding the data before striking. Once they learn the code, hackers may be able to shut off individual meters, monitor people's habits, alter their own (or their neighbor's) billing, or even crash the system with denial of service attacks. Less sophisticated pranksters could simply transmit a stronger signal on the same frequency to distort and jam meter transmissions, rendering their data useless. Its only a matter of time.

This article from CNET goes into more detail of potential security risks. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20007672-245.html

I support a smart grid in theory, but the way PG&E is doing it is all wrong!

Good to hear about the Opt-out option. This is something we should have the freedom to do for not only health reasons but also for accurate energy usage logging. The Smart meters are currently not smart enough and can´t even record Solar Energy Production if you were to get a solar system or already have one. Please contact us at

Applied Solar Energy if you have any questions about going solar and your meter situation. We support a smart grid as well but there are other technologies.