






smart meter arrests




Smart Meter protesters
[Image Source: Naperville Smart Meter Awareness]






Smart Meter
[Image Source: Naperville Smart Meter Awareness/Elster]



Sources: Chicago Tribune, Daily Herald [Naperville]

Comments     Threshold


Strange Confluence of laws
By NaperJ on 1/24/2013 5:28:09 PM , Rating: 3
I live in Naperville, and the last few people who have been fighting the meter installation are having their meters installed. People have a choice of the wireless meter, or a meter which needs to be read in person at the cost of > $25 per month. Naperville electricity is provided by a municipal electric company, not a private company, for what it's worth.

One of the women was arrested for filming the police officer after he told her she did not have permission to do so. There is a silly Illinois law which does not allow audio to be recorded without the permission of all parties. While several convictions have been thrown out, since the Illinois Supreme court has not declared the law constitutional, police continue to arrest people filming them with audio, even if the prosecutor will drop the charges.

The other woman was arrested for preventing access to the electric meter, by putting a bicycle lock on a 3 foot fence. The meter installers just stepped over the fence, but apparently by refusing to unlock it denied access, which is apparently against the law in Naperville.

While I disagree with their position on the smart meters, I saw no reason that they needed to be arrested, unless they started doing something strange after they stopped filming. Other than being annoying by repeatedly saying that neither the installers or the police had permission to be on the property, they didn't seem to be causing much of a problem, and the officer could have used his discretion about arresting them. Perhaps he was annoyed about having to follow the meter installers around and having to stand outside in the cold, or was just having a bad day.

While the meters in Naperville do have a capability for turning off the entire service, presumably for lack of payment, they do not have the direct capability of disabling any other appliance. There may be an option to have a discount by allowing the installation of an air-conditioner control, but it's not part of the smart meter roll-out.

One other strange thing which happened was that the Naperville council just this week approved paying for more manual meter reading, as the automated system is apparently not ready on time. They also approved paying for a large cost overrun on the installation program. At this point, I have to thank the other US taxpayers, as they subsidized half of this smart meter installation as part of the 2009 stimulus package, so I don't have to pay for all of it in my electric bill.

In addition to elimination of electric meter reading, the program is supposed to reduce costs by identifying where additional power is not required, through tuning microgrid power supply. Naperville is also likely to be a big home of electric cars, so car charging can be encouraged to be deferred to non-peak rates, and avoid large demand charges for peak demand by the city. But, the city water department still has to read the water meters through an interface right next to the electric meters, so there isn't that much of a savings on meter readers.

