Page 211 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

(5) ​Deployment of ‘smart’ technologies (real-time, automated, interactive
technologies that optimize the physical operation of appliances and consumer
devices) for metering, communications concerning grid operations and status, and
distribution automation;

(6) ​Integration of ‘smart’ appliances and consumer devices;
(7) ​Deployment and integration of advanced electricity storage and peak-shaving
technologies, including plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles, and thermal-
storage air conditioning;

(8) ​Provision to consumers of timely information and control options;
(9) ​Development of standards for communication and interoperability of appliances
and equipment connected to the electric grid, including the infrastructure serving
the grid;

(10) ​Identification and lowering of unreasonable or unnecessary barriers to adoption of
smart grid technologies, practices, and services.

Unlike regular electric AMR (automated meter reading) meters, smart meters are two-way
AMI (advanced meter infrastructure), supposedly to “allow utilities and customers to interact to
support smart consumption applications.” 17
Smart meters are joined at the hip with the Internet of Things (IoT). By 2020, every
American home is to have a two-way gas and electricity AMI logging energy use of smart
18
appliances at two-second intervals, as per power signatures. If Li-Fi complements your WiFi,
its 1-watt LED [light-emitting diode] has a microchip in it that can simultaneously connect
multiple computers to the Internet. Every plug-in and wireless appliance, every film you watch,
whether you are home or not, your state of wakefulness or sleep, is monitored, thanks to the
ZigBee microchip in each smart meter that wirelessly communicates from smart appliances to
utility poles, central utilities offices, police stations, and fusion centers.
And ZigBee chips have a kill switch.
Home energy accounting and surveillance are two smart meter agendas under the
technocracy. The third agenda is to serve as a node in the computing architecture, given that the
computer cards in the communications modules of smart meters have the same computing power
as a cell phone. With Linux software, Hive Computing, smart meter vendor Itron and partner
Cisco are building a mesh network of nodes from millions of smart meters for a distributed
intelligence platform of greater Smart Grid control—for “socially useful computing tasks,” of
course. 19

. . .the latent capacity of the world’s smart meter network approaches that of the world’s better known
supercomputers. For example, 3,000 smart meters have nearly the same amount of processing power and memory
capability as Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that beat Garry Kasparov in a game of virtual chess in 1997, and
150,000 meters add up to about half the computing power of IBM’s Watson supercomputer . . . 20

That’s one teraflop (1 trillion floating operations per second) of processing power. One
million smart meters is the equivalent of the world’s twentieth fastest supercomputer.
Lovely: a supercomputer module active 24/7 on the outer wall of your home or business in a
neighborhood filled with other modules, all receiving and sending transmissions, paid for by
consumers who must deal with the health issues and cybersecurity issues of third-party software