Rogue engineer supplied dodgy power to 1,500 homes A former electricity engineer is believed to have illegally supplied power to more than 1,500 addresses in a scam lasting years. Derek Brown, 45, from Tottenham, London, was yesterday handed an eight-month suspended sentence and 150 hours community service for criminal damage offences at Wood Green Crown Court. Police also …
The implication that the circuits would need to be reinstalled in order to be safe seems a little odd. He was presumably fully trained and qualified before he resigned, so one might expect him to do at least as good a job when he's working for himself, as the bloke that's now doing his old job that's going to rewire it.
Presumably, the only difference is that EDF will now know about the meters, rather than him being their only EDF contact. I doubt that he'd manage to accumulate 1500 customers without a leak if he'd told people what was really going on, so presumably he's been telling the customer that he's signing them up with EDF, reading the meter regularly, and then knocking up bills for them.
Suspicions were probably aroused when the customer service was better than expected.
Reg reporting seems a bit thin on this one.
Other sources explain these were multi-occupancy houses where the landlord managed the revenue and he did the electrical work to branch a supply to the newly-created flats.
That's why he only got a suspended sentence and one landlord got 9 months. Others are still under investigation it seems.
That bit was obvious. The original poster seemed to be under the impression (as I was from reading the article) that he was then going on to put in meters and charge people for supplying electricity to them. Then it seemed puzzling that he just got community service.
The article doesn't explain that the stealing electricity bit was committed by the landlords, at least one of whom got a custodial sentence.
Now read which borough the CID spokesman was from, and think long and hard about the likelihood that bunch of Charlies have *any* idea what they're talking about, or even the moral fibre to do anything but blindly repeat whatever claptrap their press office printed out and shoved in front of them.
all that stuff hinges on the customer being honest. Or at least being stupid enough to start out honest, so that the initial installation is done "properly" and later tampering can be detected.
I don't know what the loss rates are but if you're careful it shouldn't be too hard to vanish in the noise, after you dig up the line yourself and have a wholly-undocumented tap. RIght until they just happen to rip up the pavement and notice your tap. Though over in the Netherlands police are increasingly often "working together" with the 'leccy suppliers to ferret out illegal taps that feed grow lamps. Those can't exactly hide in an N homes, tea after television pattern.
Smart metering would definitely improve this situation - right now the grid operator never gets a snapshot of all of the meter readings taken at the same time to correlate with upstream meters.
This crime probably worked because the energy theft was distributed around fairly large area and the discrepancies were well below the value needed to set alarm bells ringing: You bet that there is significant administrative error in the energy supply business.
It will not for a different reason - it all goes at retail level at present. There is no grid and not even wholesaler involvement and the way the UK regulation is laid out there cannot be wholesaler involvement. That is one amidst many reasons for UK not going for powerline comms.
So unless the regulatory regime changes there is no way to correlate what is at substation and what is at customer premises and once you go at grid level the amount consumed by one domestic consumer is lost in the noise.
Now why is UK PLC going ahead with Smart Metering at all without doing the basics and fixing regulation on this first.... Well... No comment...
Here in British Columbia Canada the main reason we are moving to a smart grid system is that an average of 57 megawatts are stolen by marijuana growers. That's about 1% of all electricity sold in-province by BC Hydro. It will cost $930 million to install the system but it will pay for itself in eight years as we will be able to detect power diversion.
...its not the power input they notice, but the extra output -- all those grow lamps generate heat which makes the house stand out like a beacon on an IR viewer.
EDF is, of course, "Electricity de France" -- funny old world when you give up the revenue stream (and profits) from your domestic utilities to help what is essentially a French state-owned company's profits (that is, your bills that once went to subsidize the English taxpayer are now subsidizing French ones).
"and three ledgers detailing every address he illegally supplied electricity to" = Diddy.
One place I worked a few years ago, there were a few empty properties upstairs. I found cables running from the top office (empty) which I believe were supplying a good number of shops and offices in the block. It's all been redeveloped now though.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
