According to Bloomberg, a cornerstone of the Obama plan to spend $8 billion to upgrade the US utility grid is not working. There is a lawsuit in California against PG&E Corp, California’s biggest utility, after hundreds of complaints that the smart meters installed in homes don’t give accurate readings. Plus, the high cost of the meters are being passed on to consumers. Guess they don’t want to pay for something that doesn’t work.
These meters are designed to eliminate meter readers. There are to be 10 million meters installed by PG&E at a cost of $2.2 billion. Guess where they are made? By Switzerland’s Landis+GYR.
There are 8 million of these meters in the US now and that is projected to be 56 million by 2016. These meters are a critical part of the massive plan to upgrade the grid.
Of course one of the other issues with these meters is the jobs that will be lost. Union jobs.
Once again, a big government project starts to jump the tracks in the early stages. Isn’t that a big surprise?
