Ask Slashdot: Are Smart Meters Safe? 684
An anonymous reader writes "There is a lot of controversy and a big hullabaloo about Southern California Edison and various other utilities around the country installing smart meters at residential homes. Various action groups claim that these smart meters transmit an unsafe amount of RF and that they are an invasion of privacy. The information out there seems rather spotty and inconsistent — what do you engineers out there think? Are these things potentially harmful? Are they an invasion of privacy?"
Water (Score:5, Informative)
Our water meter was just replaced with a digital one that transmits to the Powers That Be. I thought it was pretty cool. The display has a photo sensor so it only comes on when you shine a flashlight on it (it's in the basement). Our reported monthly water usage is also lower since we got the new meter... I can only assume it's more accurate.
More worried about government than RF cancer (Score:5, Informative)
Under CISPA, if it passes the Senate, the government can see any private corporate record it desires. Including your smartmeter electrical usage.
Even without CISPA, governments or govt-controlled utilities at the state level have passed laws mandating rolling blackouts. So your A/C could suddenly shutoff and you'd get nice and toasty. (I prefer dumb meters that *I* control without any communication back to the central entity.)
Re:Privacy Issues Aside... (Score:5, Informative)
It's an Ask Slashdot.
Re:A Cynical Protest or a Case of Get A Tin Foil H (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trespassing.... (Score:4, Informative)
Most, if not all, electricity contracts which are required to receive service have clauses in them that allow the utility to access their property. Here is the one for British Columbia [bchydro.com].
9.5. Access to Premises
BC Hydro's agents and employees shall have, at all reasonable times, free access to the equipment supplied with Electricity, and to BC Hydro's meters, wires and apparatus on the Customer's Premises, for the purpose of reading meters and testing, installing, removing, repairing or replacing any of BC Hydro's equipment, and to ascertain the quantity or method of use of service and the amount of Electricity consumed. If access to meter rooms or other locations where BC Hydro equipment is installed is restricted, the Customer shall supply BC Hydro with lockbox keys or other keys or means of access as may be necessary to provide BC Hydro with ready access to those locations. In no case will BC Hydro accept keys to private residential Premises.
If free access to BC Hydro's equipment on the Customer's Premises is denied or obstructed in any manner, including by debris, unsafe walkways or other means of access, or the presence of animals, and the Customer does not remedy the problem upon being requested by BC Hydro to do so, service may be suspended and not reconnected until the problem is corrected;
Basically if the property owner does not let BC Hydro install a smart meter (it falls under "replacing any of BC Hydro's equipment") the electrical service can be cut off. No access, no electricity.
The physics (Score:4, Informative)
Let's see:
Compared to being hit by sunlight:
param. .Water Meter ..Sun
energy. ..0.1 watts. .300 watts .1 sec/month .1 hr/day
exposure.
photon energy . 6E-25 Joules.. 3E-19 Joules
Looks to me like that Sun is DANGEROUS, exposing you to about 3,000 times more energy per unit time, for about 110,000 times longer, and with individual photons 500,000 times more energetic.
The 900MHz radio wave photons are so weak they can't excite any atom to any higher energy level, or cause any kind of chemical change, not by a factor of 1000 or more.
Re:Privacy issue in Europe (Score:1, Informative)
Your old meter can only accumulate the power usage over its readout (by the power company) interval, usually 1 year or so.
So the power company knows you used 1500 kWh last year, but not when that happened.
With a smart meter, the readout is available for 15 minute intervals. So the power company knows when you sleep, when you
wake up, when you leave for work, when you come back, when you start cooking, when you start watching TV, etc etc etc.
If that isn't an invasion of privacy, I don't know what is.
Re:Privacy issue in Europe (Score:2, Informative)
The privacy issue comes because of TIME and because of our unnatural obsession with having computers log crap they don't have to. Knowing what time your household electricity spikes and ebbs can start to provide all kinds of info about you. When you leave for work, get home, go to bed, have a party--lots of stuff. Useful data in aggregate but useless for legitimate purposes for an individual household. However, just having the data at all makes it and you subject to subpoenas and other law enforcement fishing expeditions.
The point is that these meters collect and report more than is required for them to do their jobs, and that the excess data is almost exclusively useful to those who would do you harm.
Re:Privacy issue in Europe (Score:5, Informative)
I think the idea is that, with a smart meter, the utility can tell when you consume that power, and what the incremental steps are. For example, you could probably figure out when the occupants wake up, go to bed, turn on the computer, turn on the TV, turn on your marijuana grow lights, etc. The article lists some other things such as "whether someone uses a specific medical device or baby monitor" that I find somewhat dubious, but within the realm of possibility, especially if they have a particularly unique way of using power (the wattage used, and the duty cycle, for example - more likely with a medical device than a baby monitor, though).
That said, it's not a reason to not adopt the technology, which can bring a wide variety of benefits, as you mention. It *is* a reason to pass legislation to control who can access that data and under what circumstances, if you feel that it is likely to be mishandled.
Re:Really ? Unsafe amount of RF ? (Score:4, Informative)
Stupid never gets tired... try working in customer support for anything, you will see. IT industry even more so.
Re:Privacy issue in Europe (Score:2, Informative)
We have a smart meter for our apartment and we can get our energy usage broken down on an hourly basis. The potential problem with this anyone that gains access to our data might be able to tell when we are not likely to be at home based on the historical data. While its not a major issue it still "leaks" one more thing about the way that we live our lives.
In the industry (Score:5, Informative)
Finally, after years of lurking, a subject I can speak with authority on.
I actually got to speak to a Georgia House committee on the subject of smart meters, since I work for one of the major manufacturers. Here are some of the things I told them...
Our meters use licensed 900Mhz FSK (not spread spectrum) bursts. An average electric meter transmits 6 times a day with 1 watt EIRP (off a PCB antenna in the meter), in bursts of about 180ms. Total on-air time is nominally 1 second per meter per day.
As for privacy, we use symmetric AES-256 encryption with per-meter keys for both uplink and downlink to the meters (our meters are twoway-capable). Keys are rotated generally every three months (yes, imagine rotating 4+ million encryption keys every few months, over a system with an aggregate bandwidth of about 12kb/s).
We sell a "remote-disconnect" option in our meters, but it's expensive and only used by electric companies in limited situations. While we can trigger a remote disconnect, in the interest of safety we cannot re-energize a meter without a very complicated dance. Instead, we send an arm-for-reengize command, and then tell the consumer to take their TV remote control outside and point it at the meter and hit the "POWER" button. An IR receiver in the meter face then causes the meter to re-energize.
One of the big complaints (after they get past the RF) of the anti-smart meter groups is the use of "dirty switching power supplies". According to the anti-smart-meter web sites, these switching power supplies cause surges on the AC mains, which somehow increase cancer risks up to 13 times. The power supplies in our meters are actually certified under 3 different FCC type ratings, and are somewhere north of 95% efficient buck-boost supplies. Since the load of the metrology and RF boards in the meter is minuscule, smart meters generally only draw milliwatts while running, and the chances of inducing large spikes onto the mains is non-existent.
I got to meet some of the people behind the anti-smart-meter campaigns. For the most part, they're nice elderly ladies who get their view of the world from Pat Robertson and Fox news. They crave some cause in their life, are experiencing health issues generally related to aging and unhealthy choices, and find any new technology (especially hard-to-understand, mandatory-use technology like smart meters) scary and use it as a good scapegoat for their health worries. Everyone here realizes that a web page is the ultimate printing press, and with enough Googling you can find some "expert" pushing some kind of "science" to support pretty much any view you wish to cling to. It's embarrassingly easy to put together a semi-literate sounding alarmist web page backed up by flaky pseudo-science and gather like-minded people to your way of thinking.
Bottom line is, as an electrical engineer, an extra class amateur radio operator, and a father, there are about a million things my kids run across every day that are more damaging or dangerous than smart meters. Most of those are naturally occurring (sunlight kills more people in a year via skin cancer than every smart meter I've ever played a part in will kill in a thousand years). If you need something to stress about or blame your poor health or weird medical condition on, please find a better scapegoat than smart meters.
I'm the Tech Lead for a Smart Meter Project (Score:5, Informative)
I think most of the others have already covered the RF side of things, so I'll discuss the privacy aspects. First of all, I do realize the meters have fairly high resolution when it comes to usage so there are some privacy concerns. Keep in mind that just because the meter can tell exactly what channel you are watching in a lab environment, it doesn't work that way in the real world. No utility has the desire to store data at that level of detail. The utility I work for will store data with 1 hour resolution. That means we will know how much power was used during a specific one hour interval. This alone has enormous storage and server requirements. Going to smaller intervals would do nothing for us and compound or storage requirements so it's a non starter. We are a for profit company and have no cost justification for that kind of system. We are also not storing customer information in the same system that we are storing meter data. The system storing meter data will just have a service delivery point so the data can be tied to a customer, but it raises the difficulty level.
As far a remote shutoff goes we are working very hard to make that system as secure as practical. Those commands will be considered privileged and limited to a small group of people. There will also be limits in place so it's not like I could issue a command to shut off 100,000 customers all at once. The security is being handled in a very similar fashion to how we handle our SCADA security where a couple of key strokes can actually shutoff decent sized parts of the grid in our service territory. Needless to say at my utility we are taking your privacy and security very seriously.
So in a nutshell with one hour resolution what could someone lean about you? Well your usage patterns would give some stuff away. Probably the same sort of stuff your neighbors already know. Daily habits such as what shift you work and what time you tend to go to bed at night and what time folks get up in the morning. That being said if your utility gives you access to your data via a portal, I would probably use a fairly decent password and not share it with the world.
Re:Tinfoil hat! Get yer tinfoil hat on! (Score:5, Informative)
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
Actually, this is the entire idea behind the smart grid. The data is not for them to know how much to generate - as you pointed out, they already know that. The idea is to charge you more for the electricity that costs them more to generate. Not all power is generated equally cheaply. On a hot day with lots of A/C usage, they have to bring emergency generators on line. These burn very expensive fuels, such as natural gas, and cost them 10 times as much as the electricity generated by the much cheaper coal fired plants. They want to bill you a lot more for the times they're forced to bring those extra generators on line, because if they charge you more, you might change your mind about consuming electricity that's so expensive to produce. So the smart grid will use consumer demand to reduce their need to supply.
The smart meter's job is two-fold. One task is to record your usage depending on the rate. The other is to transmit the rates to your smart household appliances. This would be messages like "the current non-peak rate is $0.16/kWh" or "the peak rate from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM will be $3.25/kWh." If you have smart appliances that can read these messages, they can make their own decisions. You might configure your clothes dryer to run only when electricity is cheaper then $0.50/kWh, for example, meaning it would shut itself off during the really expensive peaks. Or you might configure your water heater to hold 140 degrees at $0.35/kWh rates, but 110 degrees at rates above that. This would give you the ability to make your own choices about placing peak demands on the power grid. You would think about if you really need 50 gallons of 140 degree hot water at 5:00 in the afternoon if it's going to cost you $7.00 extra per day.
The idea is simple: get people to cooperate to consume less energy. They've proven they won't do it for the environment, but they will do it for money.
Re:Privacy issue in Europe (Score:5, Informative)
They can see your usage in real time. Depending on how accurate it is, they can determine when you turn on a light, TV, computer, etc and perhaps determine the make and model of them. Some argue that they can determine when you're at home or not. Law enforcement can be notified when it looks like you just started a grow farm.
With a "dumb" meter, they just know your usage over a period of about a month. With a smart meter, they can gain massive insight into a residence's power usage which some consider a violation of privacy, information that could be sold, a possible method for a criminal to check when the place is not occupied, and/or another avenue for law enforcement to overstep existing boundaries.