The Eugene Water & Electric Board is poised to take another step toward installing 89,000 “smart” meters at customer homes to remotely gather detailed usage information — and to start and stop service with a few clicks of a computer mouse.
The utility estimates it can save $20 million over the next two decades if it gets a green light from its board — both tonight and in a second vote this summer — and can fully roll out its plans, beginning in late 2013.
But the utility has got a lot of work to do in figuring out how to finance the approximately $27 million to $33 million cost of the project, to install computer systems to run the automated meter readings and to convince a small but passionate contingent of opponents that adding one more radio frequency emitter into the fog of signals from cell phones, wi-fi, baby monitors, GPS and the like is a good idea.
Customers, too, will be looking for efficiencies as power costs increase in the coming years, EWEB is betting.
Under a smart meter system, EWEB would be able to charge varying rates for power during the course of the day, and customers could shift their energy usage to low-cost times and reap savings. Currently, ratepayers simply pay a flat rate, regardless of the time of day.
The Bonneville Power Administration, from which EWEB buys its wholesale power, is hinting at an 11 percent increase this fall, utility officials said. And increasing demand will eventually drive prices higher.
By 2020, EWEB will need approximately an additional 60 megawatts to meet the demand, spokesman Joe Harwood said. “That’s essentially three more Seneca biomass plants,” said Harwood, referring to the plant north of Eugene that burns woody debris and sells the resulting electricity to EWEB.
EWEB managers believe that if the utility can install smart meters in customers’ homes, it will help customers save money by shifting their consumption to later in the day, when power is at its cheapest. EWEB hopes it can satisfy future demand through energy gained via conservation and efficiencies, instead of by building plants.
The price EWEB pays for power fluctuates wildly throughout the day, peaking in the early evening immediately after work hours. In 2010, for instance, the swing — stated in dollars per gallon equivalents — was as wide as minus $4 a gallon to $10 a gallon.
EWEB figures that if it can prod even 10 percent to 15 percent of its customers to move their consumption outside the peak hours, the utility would save a bundle of money and be able to hold off getting new sources of energy.
Smart meters could help because when people have daily information of how much energy they use, probably via a computer display, they tend to shave their usage, the utility said.
“You automatically reduce your consumption by 15 to 20 percent,” said John Simpson, EWEB president and a smart meter enthusiast. <bolding mine, k. ging - p.s. Simpson is the only citywide EWEB rep>
Customers can opt to dry their blue jeans, run their dishwasher or charge their electric car in the late night or early morning hours.
Also, in futuristic fashion, smart-meter technology can automate energy use by sending signals to a homeowner’s appliances, telling them to start running at the optimal time.
“The meter will communicate with your (car) charger at 2 a.m. and say, ‘Charge,’ ” EWEB General Manager Roger Gray said. “That’s the vision. That’s when power is cheapest and when renewable power is available.”
Gray envisions a solution that’s invisible to customers. The smart meter could, for example, signal a consumer’s hot water heater to jack up the temperature to scalding hot in the early morning hours.
The system would have a blending device with cold water, so the temperature would be exactly as expected when it came out of the tap for morning showers — but it would cost a lot less because the energy would come from a low-cost time of day. The plan also could take advantage of wind power, which is most plentiful at night.
Some customers won’t want to participate at all, and Gray said that’s OK.
“I don’t believe in a motto of ‘We tell our customers when to consume something,’ ” he said. “If they want to do their pot roast at 6 p.m. or 5 p.m. — or if they want to cook it at night — that’s their business, not mine.
“I would like to say there’s a huge cost difference in electricity, and if you’re willing to participate and help, you get the benefit of that,” he said.
But when other utilities rolled out as many as 100 million smart meters in the past couple of years, they met with some passionate resistance.
In Texas, a homeowner pulled a pistol on a smart-meter installer. In California, a woman was arrested after refusing to move from in front of an installer’s truck. In Detroit, homeowners padlocked their meter housings.
In Eugene, an approximately 40-member group called Families for Safe Meters is opposing EWEB’s plans. Organizer Kathy Ging said her main concern is that an electric grid operated by smart meters is vulnerable to cyberattack, causing loss of power.
Dr. Paul Dart, a Eugene physician, said European studies have found a higher incidence of breast and prostate cancer in people living near cell phone towers, which give off signals similar to those emitted by smart meters.
Frequent intermittent transmissions can disturb physiology, he said. “This will disturb their melatonin secretion at night and (residents) will have difficulty sleeping,” he said.
An existing EWEB smart meter that Dart measured from 20 feet away was putting off radio frequency signals that were 100 times more potent than those already in the air, he said.
The fog of electronic signals, in general, has spooked people. The father of a middle school student in Portland, for instance, is suing the Portland School District, saying the signals are “genotoxic, carcinogenic, neurotoxic” and in other ways harmful to his daughter.
But EWEB points out that most of the national and international health organizations that have reviewed thousands of studies have found no evidence that radio frequency signals cause harm to humans.
These include Health Canada, the World Health Organization, the California Council on Science and Technology, the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
EWEB will seek to deal with its customers’ fears, if it goes forward, by creating an opt-out provision. Customers will get the new meters, but the transmitting and receiving capabilities will not be activated.
“This is not something that’s going to be settled scientifically or politically,” Gray said. “I look at the potential benefits for a majority of our ratepayers, and I just say ‘If there’s a handful of people who don’t like this, let’s just deal with that directly and have an opt-out.’ ”
“I don’t believe in a motto of ‘We tell our customers when to consume something.’ ” — Roger Gray, EWEB General Manager
<NOTE: you can see the 51 page report on the 3 different alternatives for the Smart Meter Business plan on the EWEB web site above too.>
