It's tempting to jump on the Smart Grid bandwagon. According to fans of this coming technology, a national Smart Grid could reduce energy waste by at least 5 percent, reducing annual emissions by as much as 54 million average cars might produce. President Obama included $4.5 billion for smart grid development in his first stimulus package. But as Politico points out, the big players in the Smart Grid fantasy are Google, Microsoft and IBM--coincidentally some of Obama's biggest donors during his campaign.
But as with any technology, there's a potential dark side. In an age where we display our personal lives to the world on social media, it might seem naive to try to protect some remnant of privacy. But here goes. To understand why Smart Grids represent a new threat, consider the types of data they hope to collect about how we live.
* Food Monitors: Bar coded items are "logged in" to your Smart Grid enabled refrigerator every time you move an item in or out of the unit. When a milk carton comes out but doesn't go back in, a new one is automatically ordered electronically, so your refrigerator is always stocked.
Downside: You've become a rat being "studied" in your own maze. Corporations can now catalogue the types of food you eat, when you binge, and which "treats" will appeal to you. The data may also be sold to insurance companies or potential employers who want to gain insight into how stable and risk free you are.
* HVAC Nannies: Utilities monitor your energy use 24/7--and have the ability to adjust your thermostats, or shut off your HVAC equipment should the centralized plant become overloaded.
Downside: This one's obvious. Big Brother now has control over your home environment. Maybe you have asthma and need to keep the air conditioner on a lot. The utility sees you wasting power and shuts it off. You have to petition for a special programming variance to be allowed to use more energy, through their automated parrying system--more endless bureacracy to fight through to justify your personal choices.
* Seamless Integration. You'll hear this term a lot as the Smart Grid push continues. Corporations are slavering over the "data mining" that will be made possible with this new technology. They'll have everything short of a camera in each room of every home in America, telling them how to better "serve" consumers. In almost no time, Smart Grid data will be "integrated" with home monitoring systems such as Google's PowerMeter, which tracks the activity of dishwashers, TVs, etc. (and is already being tested here.) As a result, they can target you with product constantly, alerting you to potential "risks" or "bargains" that hook you because they're so specific to your lifestyle and your house.
Downside: If you think this sounds like a paranoid exaggeration, put on your marketing hat for a minute. Imagine knowing exactly which rooms a family uses most (when do the lights turn on and off), how much they watch tv, listen to the radio--and which channels they prefer. All of your advertising messages go there. Looks like they have an older TV. Time to send them an offer for a new big screen plasma set, tagged with a photo from their favorite show. They run that basement sump pump a lot. That's information that a foundation repair company would love to have.
As you can see, Smart Grids must be approached with a big helping of caution. If the idea is to reduce our level of impact on the environment, then handing corporations almost limitless personal data about how citizens live is likely to negate any positive effects gained from monitoring energy use. Before we get too excited about Smart Grids, we need to weigh the real consequences of diving head first into an innovation that could simply fuel and accelerate our overconsumptive behavior.
Editor's Note: On the day after we published this commentary,
Green Builder received the following letter. It looks like the smart grid people are beginning to take privacy issues more seriously--an important first step if the public is expected to embrace this technology. The letter follows:
The GridWise® Alliance and Future of Privacy Forum held a meeting Tuesday hosted by the Embassy of Canada at which data privacy issues around smart grid were discussed. Privacy experts and utility representatives came together to talk through privacy issues that are now becoming relevant to an electric grid that will have significantly more digital information moving between utilities and consumers. Issues around data ownership, third party access, and utility responsibility were explored. Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Privacy Commissioner for the province of Ontario, Canada, discussed her Privacy by Design concept that she developed to ensure that data privacy is built in to the smart grid from the outset.
In my view, this venue provided an excellent opportunity for those of us working hard to modernize our electric grid to begin to understand privacy concerns that this industry has dealt with on a much less specific level than the banking or telecommunications sectors.
Jules Polonetsky, Co-Founder of the Future of Privacy Forum, was my co-moderator; his privacy experts were able to learn what information utilities need in order to supply reliable electric service to their customers. This conversation demonstrated that data privacy will need to be considered thoughtfully as we move forward on smart grid.
The GridWise Alliance and Future of Privacy Forum have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on data privacy issues and will continue to hold joint meetings and work toward policy solutions as the electric grid begins to collect and use digital information.
Katherine Hamilton
President, GridWise Alliance