Cutting-edge power?

Change could be coming in the way you buy your power. So says a KHOU report by Dave Fehling...

You may be one of the first people in the country to use a new way to pay for your electricity.

Houston power companies could soon start selling you electricity at different rates, depending on the time of day, and the old meters stuck on the side of your house could be on their way out.

It’s that time of year: summertime in a state with some of the highest costs in the nation for keeping cool.

The monthly bills were a shock to Fabiana Morris, who moved here a couple years ago from Hawaii.

“We’ve been making it a point not to keep our a/c running all the time because of what happened last year,” Fabiana said. Here’s what happened: $200 bills.

(snip)

But that’s just the beginning. In Houston, the utility company CenterPoint has plans to put even more advanced meters in a quarter-million homes -- meters that someday could allow the power company to talk to your appliances.

“This is the first of a kind,” CenterPoint Energy spokesman Don Cortez said.

The CenterPoint Technical Center has a mock-up home. In it, they’re testing the new interactive meters. Each meter is the base for an entire electronic network that uses wireless transmitters connected to major appliances.

You could control when the appliances run. For example, you could shut down a refrigerator for a few hours while you’re at work.

What’s more, the interactive meters and your home network would themselves be digitally connected to the utility company.

I like the idea of personal control. It makes a lot of sense, and in the digitized, Internet generation I'm surprised we don't have more robust remote control of our electrical consumption and other aspects of our home life. What I'm concerned about is being "digitally connected to the utility company". This sounds like the first step in having others control my consumption.

What if, say, you were having a birthday party and Centerpoint decided your power was needed in another part of the grid? What if you were home sick during a Summer day and Centerpoint decided that they were going to shut down your A/C to alleviate pressure on the grid? I don't want $9/hour operators deciding when I use electricity and how much of it I can use.

Having more control over your power usage is a good thing, giving away control of basic items to a third party is something that we shouldn't consider. It's too bad a precedent.

Of course, people who support power rationing are living under the assumption that they are somehow more green than the rest of society, so they assume that said rationing will not affect them. That they'll be the ones complaining the loudest when they lose electrical power temporarily shouldn't come to you as a huge shock.

These are the same people who drive to work and complain that more people don't take public transportation after all.