IPL's "Green Initiative"

Let's imagine for a moment that you're a large power utility in the middle of a recession. Let's also assume you got a rather large grant that will help fund your very costly green initiative. Wouldn't you start gaining support by advertising? Heck yeah, you would. Hence, there was this seemingly innocent newsletter I got from IPL that talked about these fancy new meters they were going to install that will help consumers be more green by constantly metering our power consumption and posting it on the web. Sounds great? What they don't tell you about is the catch of this $8billion Obama green energy program...

You see, as a power company you have to generate more electricity than demand so the grid doesn't get overloaded and shut down. The excess is waste and lost revenue. Even though they do their best to try and predict usage, it's expensive and difficult to do on the high power side. So instead of improving control systems, they're installing devices on the customer side that can monitor consumer usage... you know, as a gesture of greenness. Now, for what they plan to do with all this green information. Remember those pesky cell companies that used to charge different rates based on the time of the day you made a phone call? Yeah, what a pain in the butt. Heaven forbid you made a call during "Peak1 A.M. Tier1" times. I'm sure we're all glad that business model got canned.

These power utilities are, in what I can only describe as misplaced nostalgia, trying to move to this business model. Since they can't tell how much you, the consumer, uses during different times of the day the only thing they can do is charge a flat kilowatt/hour fee. Since the cellular infrastructure is now in place, these meters can report back to the utility as many times a day as they desire. So, in theory, if the utilities can plan better, they will waste less and the rates will be lower. Unfortunately, utilities have positioned themselves to benefit by a time-based fee schedule. You see, it works like this... Customer A knows it will cost more to run his toaster between 8am-10am. He has to choose whether to (1) get up earlier, (2) not eat toast, (3) pay more for his toast, or (4) drink whiskey and drive his Prius drunk while he farts green fairies out of his butthole pissed because his toast would have cost $2.75 to cook. I'm going with option 4.

To make matters worse, the whole ordeal is costing the consumer more. Let's not forget what this got PG&E in California. Here's the short version: Class action lawsuits, audits and general consumer mistrust in the form of DOUBLED ENERGY BILLS. Sounds like some win to me. I can't wait to choose to turn down my thermostat when there's a foot of snow on the ground and 8 degree temperatures outside. Also, I can't wait until all the companies in smart metered areas start moving their entire workforce to the night shift. Long live unregulated dumbassetry!