No opt out for you, DTE Energy tells Michigan town

The idea that customers want to opt out of smart meters is tough to fathom. It is 2012, we are well advanced into the digital age. We rarely refer to being online as the Internet, it is so intertwined into our lives that we don't think of it as a separate realm. I have forgotten the name already of the video rental companies that have shutdown because of video streaming, look out Netflix, you could be next. We don't all just have cell phones, but smart phones and heck email is passe with the younger generation, they text. You cannot have a car repaired until you drive it to the dealership and connect it to a computer. All this has transpired while our electric meters sat out there like museum pieces. They remind me of the WWI vintage rifles we handed to draftees into the second WW. We may have trained with them but we didn't go into battle with them.

Going to digital meters is a natural progression, and juxtaposed against all the other advancing technology around us, seems pretty mild. Out on the grid itself utilities have steadily deployed enhanced sensing and switching capability using very similar technology. None of us see it, but its there.

As to the question of who benefits from smart meters, if people opt out what should they pay, that isn't so complicated. Utility ratemaking is based on the central principle that cost causer pays. If digital meters are the standard, and the cost to continue manual reads and outage support etc. simply has to be charged those that choose to pass on the new meter. The assertion that folks that opted out already paid in their federal taxes is technically correct but impractical. Tax receipts pay for a multitude of programs and services that benefit both narrow and wide. Stimulus for smart grid could just have easily been medical technology research or food stamps.