Letter to the Editor – Energy costs

Written by Reader Submission on 14 December 2010

*From the Editor: As with all Letters to the Editor, the views and opinions expressed below do not necessarily represent views or opinions of OntarioNewsNorth.com or it’s advertisers. It is up to the reader to research facts/opinions expressed in letters to the editor to form your own opinions from an informed position. I did feel this particular letter, raised questions that were worth thinking over and looking into. Share your opinions and letters by mailing them to LetterToTheEditor@OntarioNewsNorth.com .

Dear OntarioNewsNorth.com Editor;

As there seems to be some concerns about energy use in town, the following are my opinions on the Smart Meter/Grid system. I will include references at the bottom, so that you can confirm for yourself what I am saying.

From the faceplate of my meter I see that the transceiver uses one watt of power and the meter itself uses three watts of power. Being a senior I used a magnifying glass to confirm that I did not miss any decimal points.

That’s a total of 4 watts of always-on power being consumed by the meter every hour of the day every day of the year. (4x1hr x 24hr x 365 days = 35040 Watt hours or 35.04 KWhs.). Is that a phantom load or a vampire load? Divide that by 12 months gives 2920 Whrs or 2.92 KWhrs per month. One way or the other the consumer pays for this power!

Hydro sent a pamphlet with my hydro bill recommending the use of the OEB’s online monthly bill calculator. This is an excellent utility that you can use to determine with reasonable accuracy what your monthly bill should be. All you need to do is read your meter daily at approximately the same time each day. Then when your bill arrives use the dates that hydro claimed to have read your meter, or estimated your reading, to determine the difference in KWhrs used from that of last months bill. Unfortunately, in the case of an overestimate you cannot enter a negative value, so just treat the difference as what hydro owes you. You may be surprised at how much HST and hydro that you are paying for in advance.

Getting back on track, let’s assume that the 2.92 KWhrs is added directly to my bill and plug it into the OEB calculator. But first let’s take a one month vacation and before we leave lets turn of every breaker in the house including the main breaker, so that we consume zero power.

Time to go online and open the calculator.

Enter Hydro Network Inc as the Utility.

Since we don’t exist there, enter the nearest service area. I used Terrace Bay –R1.

Now enter 2.92 as your monthly usage.

Results:

Electricity $00.20

Delivery $21.27

Regulatory $ 0.27

Debt Retirement $00.02

Total Electricity $21.76

HST $02.83

Total amount $24.59

The verdict is in, it’s a vampire load. $24.59 times 12 months equals $295.08. According to our government that’s over two months of hydro. Kind of blows your mind doesn’t it?

Oh! Don’t forget the government is giving us a 2% break after HST.

From the above calculation it would appear that the delivery charges are not linear with the electricity usage. Also, when you are over estimated how do they determine at what KWhrs you’re charged at what price, especially when and where a price change comes into effect?

Back to smart meters again. There are some 3.1 to 4.1 million meters to be installed.

2.92 KWhrs times 3.1 million equals 9,052,000 KWhrs per month (9,052 Megawatts/month). 9,052 KWhrs times 12 months equals 108,624 MWhrs.

That’s just the meters. The Smart Grid now requires a multitude of transceivers to cover our little Province. Start with a transceiver at each street transformer, add repeaters and a much more powerful one at each main hydro transformer. Add in all the computers and software to tabulate and send your bill out.

The meters are only good for about 20 years. Computers as we all know are automated obsolescences. Software , well I’ll try not to stutter when I print the word update. I’m sure Kermit has both a belly ache and a migraine by now.

Outside of the improved ability to bill the consumer and the obvious advantage to big business I see no real innovative technology here. Just the same old stuff wrapped up into a mesmerizing Treky package. Oh I forgot, Hydro will be able to operate a larger system with fewer employees, as compared to the number of employees they have for the present system. Sorry but that’s what automation is.

Sorry I can’t help myself:

Knock Knock question: How many wind turbines does it take to power the smart meter/Grid system?

Answer: None. It takes a nuclear plant!