New solutions from BC-Freedom: “Do Not Pay Extortive Opt-Out Fees” (Feb 2014)

Electromechanical power meters have been a wonderful item since Edison invented one, since Samuel Gardiner patented another one in 1872.
In 1885 Galileo Ferraris of Turin, Italy made a key discovery, that two out of phase AC fields can make a solid armature rotate. This discovery spurred development of induction-type motors as well as paving the way for the development of the induction-type watt-hour meter.
Electromechanical watt-hour meters were built to last indefinitely. They are able to just keep right on going, for upwards of 85 to 100 years, often longer.
Most, if not all, hydro customers ought to remember how adamantly hydro defended the safe reliability of analogue meters, which have been around and worked hard every day since long before hydro existed. Many customers may personally know this firsthand, since BC Hydro routinely insisted that this analogue reliability was indeed the case, all the time, for many decades. In fact that was hydro’s standard line. If any customer ever queried whether they might have been overcharged, hydro had solid grounds to insist that there was no way, that it was not possible, since analogue meters were (and still are) 100% reliable, steady and predictable. Numerous customers report that the utility in BC stood by this entirely justifiable claim in no uncertain terms, for countless decades. They argued definitively that analogue meters never break down, never malfunction, that they were built to go the distance and that nothing ever goes wrong with them.
Just think about it. Electromechanical meters are so damned reliable, they can practically last forever. Now the government hate them for precisely that same reason, because the manufacturers built them too well.
Analogue meters do not invade privacy, nor enable time-of-use, nor provide valuable private data about occupants’ habits. These days, from hydro’s point of view that IS the problem with electromechanical meters that justifies getting rid of every last one of them by hook and by crook.
Spying, frequency analysis and data theft is what the term “modernization” is really all about. The trouble is that with an analogue meter there are no transient spikes and microwave pulses to up the bills and “capitalize” on. A mechanical meter does not capture ambient transients from dissipated electricity which software can misleadingly translate into “usage”. With the electromechanical meters there is no customer funded continuous electronic “chat” necessary to sustain a “modern” system, no way, for the first time in history, to link together 5000 meters into one continuous data swapping circuit. What good is a meter which measures real time usage rather than estimating static energy fields? Why keep a device which offers no revealing bonus information, nothing to data mine, no activities to track, no opportunity for corporations to socially engineer behaviour, no electronic, wireless means to co-opt and control every separate wire in every customer’s service panel and thereby take over every aspect of all energy use, at enormous profit.
In short, why else does anyone think nearly every utility the world over has spent billions of tax dollars in the midst of a very shaky economy, if not to share with their masters countless trillions, to create another corrupt market opening up like a chasm to swallow customers in exchange for short term unimaginable gain from sub prime electricity futures derivatives?
With an analogue meter there is no to way to maximize unprecedented “smart” (meaning corporate) profit. A safe non glitzy, non expensive and long lived electromechanical meter is sty in the corporate eye. Hence the need to smash every last one of these solid long term investment meters, to rid the world of reliable, honest and predictable devices capable of real time measurement.
An analogue meter which is not designed to fail, which was never intended to become obsolete, is now viewed by government and utility alike as a corporate liability.
Corporate greenwash posturing aside, faux “green” is a facade, a cover story meant to hide highly profitable profligacy, and to facilitate data resales to third parties. Plastic throw away computers are only intended to operate short term, merely a means to an end, profitable obsolescence intended to enable obscene executive bonuses based on the turnover of throw away consumerism. And that is why nothing is so galling to the corporate bottom line as customers who want to retain a reliable instrument, a user friendly, readable meter which simply records usage accurately and continues to work perfectly well, decade in and decade out. Why else do we witness corporations everywhere willing to go to such lengths to try to rid the world of a metering device this uniquely sturdy, transparent and honest?