Obama Promises “Smart Meters” In Our Homes, But What Are Smart Meters?
In Obama’s speech yesterday after signing the “stimulus” into law he mentioned saving energy by installing something called “smart meters” in the homes of Americans.
Today, the electricity we use is carried along a grid of lines and wires that dates back to Thomas Edison, a grid that can’t support the demands of clean energy. This means we’re using 19th- and 20th-century technologies to battle 21st-century problems like climate change and energy security.
It also means that places like North Dakota can produce a lot of wind energy but can’t deliver it to communities that want it, leading to a gap between how much clean energy we are using and how much we could be using.
The investment we are making today will create a newer, smarter electric grid that will allow for the broader use of alternative energy. We will build on the work that’s being done in places like Boulder, Colorado, a community that is on pace to be the world’s first Smart Grid city. This investment will place Smart Meters in homes to make our energy bills lower, make outages less likely and make it easier to use clean energy.
It’s an investment that will save taxpayers over $1 billion by slashing energy costs in our federal buildings by 25 percent and save working families hundreds of dollars a year on their energy bills by weatherizing over 1 million homes. And it’s an investment that takes the important first step towards a nationwide transmission superhighway that will connect our cities to the windy plains of the Dakotas and the sunny deserts of the Southwest.
Now, I’m not necessarily against upgrading our electrical grid, but I do have to marvel at the spectacle of Obama promising a new electrical grid to bring from North Dakota to the rest of the nation wind energy that, frankly, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t heavily subsidized by the government. Essentially, what Obama is wanting to do is bring to market an energy product that wouldn’t exist without government subsidy and that wouldn’t even be used if it weren’t for additional government subsidy and mandate of its use.
I won’t even mention the taxpayers being billed to weatherize the homes of people who couldn’t be bothered to get up off the couch long enough to hang up some plastic sheeting and rubber strips on their own.
What really caught my attention was this “Smart Meters” thing. During the campaign Obama said that we can’t just have our thermostats set wherever we want (even though he sure likes cranking the thermostat in his own office, the big hypocrite). Is this “Smart Meters” thing a way for the government to monitor our energy consumption?
It appears as though it is, and I wonder if the Smart Meters the “stimulus bill’ is going to put into place are going to report our energy consumption to the government? If so, what an awful thing!
If the government starts monitoring our energy consumption, it will only be so long until the government is dictating to us how much energy we can use.
And what does that have to do with freedom and liberty?
It should would have been nice if we could have read and debated this bill before Democrats pushed it through Congress.
