smart meters

smart-meter

Gordon Brown often offers to save the world. So, why not send the £8.1 billion saved from NOT establishing smart meters to Haiti? The tiny climate change mitigation that these meters are supposed to produce are vastly outweighed by the horrors unfolding in Haiti.

The European Union said in 2006 that smart meters should be made mandatory, but voters in the Netherlands have vigorously opposed a compulsory rollout and succeeded in persuading politicians to vote against it. The fears are that data on energy consumption could be misused by criminals, police or insurance companies. Dutch consumer and privacy organisations were concerned that information relayed as frequently as every 15 minutes could allow employees of utility companies to see when properties were empty or when householders had bought expensive new gadgets. See here.