I can see clear advantages in smart grid technology but I can also see the potential to punish and control with it.
This smart grid has shades of the old eastern europe way of heating homes in it. In a city, there is a central hot water heating plant, then the hot water is distributed throughout the city to heat homes. IT seems to me that it must be terribly inefficient so I always wondered why they did it. The reason is control. Piss off the local Komissar and all of a sudden you find yourself without heat when its -20 outside.
Then I got to thinking about the rivalry between Edison and Tesla. The knock against Edison’s electric grid design was that you would need a power plant every few blocks because he was using DC whereas Tesla had designed an AC system so the power could be transmitted over large distances from a large centralized plant. If one of Edison’s plants had gone down, no big deal - go a few blocks away and someone would have power. One of our large centralized power plants goes down or a tree branch takes out a transmission line in Ohio and suddenly there is chaos and disorder in a quarter of the country.
Anyone else remember a year or two ago when they wanted to install thermostats in some part of CA that could be controlled by some bureaucrat?
A terrible idea. Anywhere it’s being tried (like Boulder Colorado) massively over budget, huge expenses hidden in state budget, original funding structures completely misleading, legal battles between utility providers and state offices over who will pay millions in extra costs, hundreds of thousands in overcharges, big privacy concerns.. in other words another liberal ‘solution’ to a non-existent problem.
It was also Technocrats who pushed for Keynesian economics. These people never address the misery they cause.
This "central control" is so much BS.
Technocracy must be seen for what it is: An attempt to impose a totalitarian, scientific dictatorship. In 1933, it called for the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as dictator in order to “pave the way for economic revolution.” Fortunately at the time, they failed in their attempted coup.
If today’s Smart Grid is successfully completed, it will enable the conversion of our existing economic system into something far different and far worse. This is why the American people repudiated Technocracy in 1933, and this is exactly why we (and citizens around the world) should thoroughly repudiate it today.
Took way too long to get to the “bottom line”.
I didn’t like it when local utilities sold out, I belong to a private coop utility, however, today most utilities are so integrated into the present grid system, that they are more dependent on each other than ever before. That said, they all seem very suspicious of government efforts at intervention in the private power generation business, as am I. The solution to smart grid is private power generation, and insulation from government intervention.
I also don’t think adding another word technocracy to describe the numerous words we now have to describe what has been going on for centuries, is productive.
Communism, statism, Socialism, leftism, liberalism, do just fine explaining the myriad ways that totalitarians, have of applying their godless, power grabbing, Utopian ideas to freedom loving people.
We’re doomed.