Smarte Grid

The Safeway, the supermarket nearest me, operates a Key Club Member program (something like that) that, if you enter in your code or phone number, you get instant savings.

I would love to understand exactly how corporations use this information. Perhaps they discover that people who buy fresh spinach are statistically inclined to buy Oro De Oxaca tequila, while those who buy canned spinach are warmed to Cazadores. My gut feeling is this data is sold to third parties who take these relevancies and figure out a way to market and sell more shit to people.

I also think that they could easily determine which households consume an above average volume of red meat, processed peanuts, sour cream, and bacon, and find ways to legally exclude them from insurance pools or at a minimum ensure that insurance products aren't marketed to them or that designer health care products tailored to the fat & diseased are marketed to them. Insurance premiums could be raised on such people, and lowered for fresh kale and cabbage buyers. If you've ever been electronically flagged for having bought a pack of cigarettes, watch out.

Then along comes our more smarter smart grid, wa-hey! where my utility will someday be sitting on a few million terabytes of user information. I'd bet anything anything! that an additional revenue stream will be created by selling this data to appliance manufacturers, marketing firms, and the like. Perhaps digging through all this information it's revealed that there's a statistical correlation between when the Blackberry turns on and when the cell phone charging station stops charging, leading to better integration of these two products allowing for more sales of both.

Maybe local law enforcement might process this data to determine if your alibi holds up -- do the electrical on and offs correspond to a person who says he was sleeping at the time of the bludgeoning?

Maybe home AMI compliant smart-behind-the-meter microprocessor based home-energy solutions products will offer a web based portal to allow you to program your electric water heater to start incrementally warming up as soon as the electric treadmill is sensed coming on so you'll have a warm shower after your workout without all that bothersome waste in heating a tank of water when you aren't using it. And are you using firmware ver. 4.56? No? Well, then you'd better spend fifty more minutes of your life downloading this latest version because version 3.60 can't process the protocols from the newer IEEE C75.4 compliant water heating elements.

Damn, it's obvious my earlier contempt for what a Smart Grid's gonna bring us was rather shortsighted. I have clearly failed to understand how much better my future life is going to be once Smart Grid starts automatically controlling all this shit for me while I sit back and relax. I must have overstated the loss of my life-energy when I have to drive my batterized car twelve miles to the Smart Store and spend a half a day choosing from sixty-five different Smart Plans (rollover kilowatts) and payment options for ancillary services like Boysenberry-enabled home energy apps. I have clearly failed to understand that getting a nineteen-page electronic electricity bill sent to my Boysenberry will take less time to mentally process and understand than my current one page bill. I've clearly overstated problems like "I plugged it in and the damn thing don't work" and the hours spent on my iPhone with the manufacture to discover that my smart-enabled dishwasher's port settings aren't compatible with my existing 1350 nM fiber optic cable and that I should go out, buy, and install the 1550 nM cable for better throughput and reduced system crashes. Lastly, I've overstated all those unemployed hackers who will find a way to 'reduce' their energy use. I've incorrectly calculated my time lost that I'll have to spend uploading patches and service packs to my own integrated home area network to prevent hackers from fucking with my system, such as spamming my Boysenberry iTron with unsolicited requests for better smart grid products.

I've also failed to appreciate the smart grid savings I'm going to get while smart grid service charges, CPUC fees, CEC smart grid restructuring assessments and utility user connection fees are paid even though I'll use less than 10 kWh a day because I'll generate my own from solar and I'll install future home energy improvement projects. I should welcome the fact that 75% of my future bill won't come from energy that I actually use, but rather will consist of all these smart grid fees, charges, taxes, assessments, surcharges, tolls, dues, levies, surtaxes, tariffs, stipends, and duties.

Yeah, life's definitely gonna get even better, less hurried and less stressed with our Smart Grid. I also think that if my industry called it a Smarte Grid (which sounds more sophisticated with that extra 'e') we'd sell this crock of shit to the public a lot easier.