Just Say No to Big Brother’s Smart Meters by Orlean Koehle Although different utilities define the smart grid in different ways, the key feature is a


two-way communication system between a household's meter and the electricity utility so that energy consumption can be tracked with incredible — sometimes even minute- by-minute — detail. So-called Smart Meters are the first step in creating a smart grid. In Canada, Ontario has been first off the mark. The province has already installed 1.1 million Smart Meters and plans to have one in every household by the end of 2010. In the U.S., Boulder, Colo., has taken the lead to become the first city with Smart Meters for every customer. "Our expectation is that this network will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than the internet," Marie Hattar, vice-president of marketing at U.S.-based Cisco Network Systems Solutions, said when the company announced last year that it intended to make communication equipment for the smart grid. "If you think about it, some homes have internet access, but some don't. Everyone has electricity access — all of those homes could potentially be connected." How it works:- In its most basic form, the smart grid allows utilities to read meters without sending out an employee; instead the meters send a reading back to the utility automatically. But Ontario's push into Smart Meters has been aimed at changing consumer behaviour, so the launch in that province goes further. "The Ontario government wanted to get price transparency into the hands of the consumers," says Rick Stevens, director of distribution development at Ontario's Hydro One. "So we're building all the back-office systems to allow customers to get better price transparency through time-of-use rates, which is something we'll be rolling out in the next few months." Many households with Smart Meters can already go online and log in to an energy- use account to see how much energy they used during a specific time period. By giving people more detailed information about their electricity usage, the assumption is that they will be willing to reduce their consumption or re-schedule it to off-peak hours when the rate may be cheaper.


Privacy Concerns: Things get trickier from a privacy perspective if the system offers real-time statistics, since electricity use is a good indication of whether someone is at home at that very moment and what they are doing - if they're awake or asleep, for example. Eventually, utilities will have the ability to allow consumers to see how their energy use compares to that of their neighbors, information that, if not sufficiently protected, could reveal many things about your neighbors' comings and goings as well.


Utilities promise this data will be encrypted and assigned an anonymous number that can't be tracked back to an individual customer. But the cyber security co-ordination task group that has been addressing smart grid privacy concerns in the U.S. has warned, "there is a lack of formal privacy policies, standards, or procedures by entities who are involved in the smart grid and collect information." It added that, "comprehensive and consistent definitions of personally identifiable


information do not generally exist in the utility industry." Stevens, who has been in touch with Cavoukian and has read the smart grid report,


says Hydro One has both hardware and software safeguards in place to preserve customer privacy. "Hydro One's approach is to build security requirements right up front and put them into our tender documents so that safeguards are integrated as part of the overall design," says Stevens. "Privacy by design is what we live and breathe."


Smart Appliances: 55


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