PPM vs. PPM

A show called Revolution premiered on NBC this fall, telling the story of a future 15 years after a world-wide blackout. Not only does the entire electrical grid fail, but cars grind to a halt and even battery powered devices stop working. The exact cause isn't clear, but some suspect it has something to do with a set of special pendants. Intended to generate free energy, they instead cause other electrical devices to stop working with their electromagnetic pulses. It turns out there is a valuable lesson embedded within the plot of this fledgling series.

Today, Vermont and dozens of other states and countries are working on a project called the "Smart Grid." The visible cornerstone of this infrastructure upgrade is the smart meter, a solid-state (digital) device that is replacing existing electromechanical (analog) meters. Not unlike Revolution's little pendants, smart meters are designed to save power. However, the new meters have a number of problems that are already making our grid less stable and our homes and businesses less safe and less healthy.

A Toyota Prius converted to an herb garden in Revolution

According to Paul Hines, a professor of electrical engineering at UVM, a primary goal of smart meters is to reduce power consumption, resulting in lower emissions of the greenhouse gases produced by most power plants. Many scientists and environmentalists are convinced that the amount CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is the most important indicator of climate change. This may be true, but other factors besides CO2 are affecting the Earth's climate. And, despite our best efforts to conserve energy, diminishing reserves of the fossil fuels that generate most of our electricity and enable nearly all of our transportation will curb our emissions no matter what. Just as we are now questioning the value of figures like Gross Domestic Product (instead looking to calculations like Gross National Happiness), we must reconsider whether parts per million of CO2 paints a complete picture of our future.

Smart meters communicate with Green Mountain Power by transmitting radio frequency signals. But unlike many wireless devices that constantly emit radio waves (cell towers, cordless phone base stations, and Wifi routers, to name a few), these new electric meters send chirps or bursts of RF at intervals. These signals are indiscriminately pumped in whichever direction a meter happens to be facing. With any luck, the pulse will find another meter before relaying through up to 50 other meters on its way to a "collector" that sends data back to Green Mountain Power's central office. Originally, GMP stated that their meters would transmit every 15 minutes, but they later changed that figure to once every 4 hours. More recently they have clarified that transmissions occur "a few times a day." However, independent tests conducted at dozens of installed smart meters have shown that these RF pulses occur much more often. If we are so concerned about miles per gallon, cents per kilowatt hour, or parts per million of any given chemical pollutant, why are we ignoring the emissions and effects of pulsed RF radiation which has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as a Group 2B carcinogen?

Even if we were to set aside for a moment the dozens of non-thermal health effects associated with exposure to microwaves, it is impossible to deny that radio waves excite every living tissue and water molecule they hit, heating them up. Considering this fact, shouldn't we be asking how much additional RF energy is being pulsed into the environment and whether it could change the climate as well? Some believe that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska is doing exactly that. In addition to having the capacity to affect weather and living things, these pulses of EMR can interfere with electronics that are poorly shielded. The phenomena of electromagnetic interference (EMI) is alluded to in the first scene of Revolution, when the cartoon "Falling Hare (Bugs Bunny Knows a Gremlin)" is shown on TV, just before the lights go out.

By analyzing the "pulses per minute" of a variety of different electric meters in Vermont and New Hampshire, we can see the difference between these different electric meters is considerable.

CVPS analog meters: 0 RF pulses per minute

GMP analog meters: 0 PPM

PSNH analog meters: 0 PPM

NHEC analog meters: 0 PPM

CVPS solid-state non-transmitting meters: 0 PPM

PSNH solid-state non-transmitting meters: 0 PPM

GMP electromechanical RF "drive-by" meters: 10-12 PPM

NHEC smart meters: 0-1 PPM

GMP/CVPS smart meters: 5-30 PPM

Both New Hampshire Electric Coop and GMP/CVPS picked the same meter manufacturer and model, yet GMP's meters pulse up to 200 times more often than those being deployed by NHEC. Because PSNH did not receive stimulus funding in 2009, their customers will have non-transmitting meters indefinitely.

While debate about the health effects caused by man-made electromagnetic radiation and the efficacy of building a Smart Grid in Vermont and elsewhere will no doubt continue, GMP customers, their electronics and Vermont's environment are being exposed to far more pulses of Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) RF than in New Hampshire. I won't speculate on why this is, but hopefully Green Mountain Power plans to offer an explanation to Vermonters and the revised smart meters and health report that Richard Tell Associates is submitting to the Department of Public Service, Vermont Department of Health and the Vermont Legislature in January will include this information as well.

Fisken: Looking for answers from GMP - VT Digger