Sacramento cops scoured energy records to target suspected weed growers, and the EFF has sued The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advanced a lawsuit in which it alleges the City of Sacramento misused energy records to accuse residents of growing cannabis, often with disastrous results. According to a statement from the digital rights group, local law enforcement authorities have worked with local power company, the …
Looking at roofs with no snow on them and open windows when the neighbouring houses have a foot of snow intelligence on them isn't a violation of any right - it's in plain sight, visible from the street, or with a drone flying along the street, capturing houses on both sides without the need to overtly anyone's private property.
Actually it wouldn't require a warrant, it would however require a RIPA Authorisation to conduct covert surveillance.
Walking down the street and observing something in plain sight, like one roof free of snow in a whole street would require neither. You would however need a warrant to enter the premises.
Forget about the "panic" over smart meter radiation. I always knew it was just going to be another way to track you and do whatever-raise your bill-raid your house. Fortunately, I've gone off grid so they can suck on my dormant meter all they want. Unfortunately, not many have this choice available.
In the UK British Gas keep petitioning the government for the ability to just "turn off" smart meters to 'problematic' areas. i.e. places where there are a significant number of non-white customers.
They don't want these people to have electricity basically OR be forced onto prepayment meters where the energy is charged at 2-3x the standard rate.
They've been repeatedly caught engaged in homophobic, racial, gender, religious and socio-economic discrimination (i.e. new customers in poor areas should only get prepayment)
It’s worth remembering that in general, smart meters weren’t wanted by utilities – they were imposed by Governments. When I was working with Californian utilities back in the 2010s, the utilities were struggling to work out what to do with them. They liked the possibility of time of use pricing, but generally didn’t have the back end systems to support the complexity. At least one utility was still using Excel 2003, which only supported 65,536 rows, which meant they kept on losing customers off the bottom of their spreadsheets.
Faced with those limitations, they went for the simple stuff, which was trying to find out who was growing cannabis, as they felt that led to good PR opportunities. The other use was to claim that their bills were accurate. I recall the CEO of one utility stating at an industry event that “the best thing about smart meters is that they help us blame the customer”.
Smart meters have the potential to help customer and the grid, but have generally been designed so that they don’t. The UK is probably the best example of how not to do it, where their design and deployment was left to the energy suppliers, who are generally the most technically illiterate section of the supply chain. (Although Octopus is bucking that trend.) So don’t expect them to do anything useful. Ed Milliband’s probably working on a scheme to use them to detect asylum seekers smuggling energyout of wind farms …
"The UK is probably the best example of how not to do it, where their design and deployment was left to the energy suppliers,"
It wasn't "left to", it was imposed by government against the wishes of energy suppliers, and against the advice of distribution networks who actually did know a lot about such matters. I worked as a strategy manager for a supplier whose parent company owned a DNO at the time, and last thing the supplier wanted was another shitheaded government net zero scheme, full of fanciful targets and accompanied by massive fines for any "failure" by us to magick up a new system that we hadn't asked for, and then install it. Especially given that at that time most suppliers had, and perhaps still have no useful expertise in home installations.
The problem with UK smart meters was that the morons of government demanded "competition" in every tiny fragment of the value chain, and decided a great way of doing this was to lock down an immutable specification for the meters, and create yet another special purpose company (DCC) to bugger things up further. Hence SMETS and SMETS2. The SMETS2 spec is essentially a bureaucrat's wish list of functionality from 2012. As you can imagine, it's now totally out of date, offers few useful capabilities, yet the total programme cost for smart metering is about £20 billion all in.
Bloody hell. I thought we were a high usage household here with the kids and grand daughter with all the washing and tumble drying they did. 2 x fridge freeze and my kit (laptops and and always on server), our son and his kit - multi laptop and screens too, 2 x electric car and we only get to juse over 1,100 Kwh during winter. Now it is summer and kids are gone, we are just over 500.
What do you run to get 2800 let alone 7000Kwh per month. I cannot see a heat pump making that much difference
Sensible or not, you find similarly built houses, i.e. poorly insulated and cheaply thrown up, in the USA outside California too: there are a lot of them in Seattle.
Damned if I know why so many houses are built the way they are: those shrieking that the UK needs more and better houses NOW should take a look at the Lockwood houses in NZ: these have been around since the early '60s: these are a set of standard designs that are designed to be sold as factory-made kits and assembled on a poured concrete platform. The structure is based around using 2" x 4" tongue and grooved wood walls and flooring. Walls are pre-drilled for water pipes and electric cables, so the entire house can be simply slotted together and pipes and wiring slid into pre-drilled channels on the walls. Once the concrete base has set, the rest of the house, including doors and windows, is delivered to the site and assembled, which typically takes just a week or two for a typical four bed house. They seem to be about as durable as any other wooden house and, thanks to their solid wooden walls, come with insulation built in. Later versions come with external pre-painted alloy cladding on the outer walls.
Something like the Lockwood house building system would seem to be ideal for solving the UK housing shortage, but of course that will never happen because:
(1) they weren't invented here, so:
(2) no UK Civil Servant or Minister has ever been known to get off his fat arse and check out anything that wasn't Invented Here.
Partly, but don't forget that the existing building supply chain is deeply conservative, and all the established market players (who have all the landbanks, the knowledge and expertise to secure development rights) won't touch modular or system build. There's some excellent European system build technologies, but again, British volume housebuilders won't touch them, then you've got local building control (who still live in 1950) who don't understand system build approaches. And finally, you've got the nobs of the surveying and valuing sector who don't understand them, and mortgage lenders who are a bunch of complete and utter bankers, and will either not lend, or impose higher rates due to the "risk of the unknown".
The entire house planning, building and financing sector needs it's head banging against a traditionally constructed brick wall, thieving neanderthals the lot of them.
Totally with you there, this from the UK energy price cap info : "We estimate the typical household in England, Scotland and Wales uses 2,700 kWh of electricity and 11,500 kWh of gas in a year."
OK this is America and that is for the VERY expensive UK where we can't afford to use any more but even so..........
> I thought we were a high usage household.... we only get to just over 1,100 Kwh during winter.
Coastal Maine USA. We are normally near 600KWh/mo but then the gas furnace blew a leak in a sub-freezing week. Expecting this we also have a propane fireplace but it really is a one-room thing, so lots of electric spot-heat. Even so we barely beat 1,100KWh that month. I can't imagine how a reasonable house can be 2,800!
Back 30 years ago a friend got the knock on the door. A meter-tech and a police officer. They asked if she knew any reason her electric consumption had gone way up. Actually she did! She took them down cellar and showed her new pottery kiln. Uses 5,000 Watts, runs for days, and because it was new she was trying it a lot. The room was full of fired pots with artistic glazes. The tech did his sums and agreed that the kiln accounted for the extra electric. They thanked her and left. She rolled a joint to celebrate.
I have three phase coming to distribution fuses in house with my smart meter and everything downstream on just one phase. I guess I could use one of the other phases for a heat pump and electric car charger, and run a weed farm off the other. It would be a good way to go green.
AC ........ because. ....... actually I could run AC off the other phase too.
> I could use one of the other phases for a heat pump and electric car charger, and run a weed farm off the other.
You are still going to pay for all you use. There may be a couple-percent reduction in line loss if your present loads were spread over 3 conductors but you'd hardly notice. Conceptually each phase has its own meter. (Actually Blondel's Theorem says that you can use N-1 meters and infer the missing phase.)
Well... I think the power companies would prefer it if people paid for their electricity when growing plants. This just provides incentive to steal it.
Or, you know, they could just legalize it across the country, so anybody can have strains of their choosing, for any reason they want, as a competitively priced commodity, and then most people (like me) couldn't be arsed to grow it, and the hobbyists that do aren't having large, unsafe operations.
But that's not the American way, because, authority.
