Time, benefits will win over smart-meter foes

It feels like centuries ago, but it still wasn’t hard in the late ’90s to find people — even educated professionals and experienced entrepreneurs — who wouldn’t promote their businesses with a website or use email for fear of having too much private information become public and freely available to a worldwide audience.

We’re at a similar point today with smart meters and smart-grid technologies. Case in point: Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) proposal last week to let customers concerned about smart-meter transmissions have the radios in those devices switched off for a price.

It’s almost certain that many of the people who’ve been clamoring for that option voluntarily use a plethora of radio-wave-emitting electronic devices every day: mobile phones, microwave ovens, remote controls, wireless headphones, laptops, iPads, radios, video games, GPS devices, you name it. The problem, really, boils down to this: in these people’s mental calculations of benefits vs. risks, smart meters haven’t yet proven their worth, while these other devices have.

Let’s go back to the late ’90s website/email analogy. Were the late-adopters right that establishing a presence online would give people around the globe access to a lot of information about themselves? Yes. Just look at all the details you can learn about almost anyone today with a few Google searches and a trip to Facebook. But, for most people, the utility — the ever-growing benefits — of having a website and an email address won out over the what-if privacy concerns. For every one person who might be fired for something she said about her supervisor on Facebook, one million people have found the information access and social networking potential of an online presence worth the risk.

And here’s where the rubber will meet the road for smart meters. If they perform as advertised over time, if they do prove helpful for saving on energy bills and making a real difference that customers will notice, today’s detractors will eventually be won over.

That’s not to say that utility companies can’t do more to speed the process along. Better two-way communications — ironically, something smart meters offer on the electronics side — between utilities and customers, on the face-to-face human side, can do a lot to ease concerns and answer questions people might have about new smart technologies. And, as inconvenient as it might be for energy companies to allow customers to opt out of smart meters, it’s an important option for them to offer right now. Already-sceptical people tend to harden their opinions even more if they’re told they have no choice on the matter.

For now, PG&E’s decision is a good, if belated one. Customers who want the radios in their smart meters switched off would pay “reasonable upfront and recurring fees” to cover the cost of manual readings and other adjustments the utility would have to make, ensuring that customers who accept the meters as they are wouldn’t incur any additional expenses. Ten years from now, it’s likely those late-adopters will be as rare as people without email addresses today.