Smart Meters

There has been a lot of hysteria about smart meters being some secret plot to kill people. This makes about as much sense as fearing electrocution from your pocket calculator. Smart meters put out much less radiation than a cellphone.

However, I smell a rat — Accenture, the company that handles billing for BC Hydro. I used to work for the BC Hydro Computer Department and learned how incredibly complicated the computer billing is. With all the extra data coming in from the smart meters, the centralised computer billing to handle it would become many times more complicated still.

Almost everyone noticed a huge spike in their bills when the smart meters went into effect. Most likely this was caused by an error in the central billing program created by inadequate testing, incompetence in testing the program or fraud. Then bills dropped back to normal, but without any rebate. BC Hydro/Accenture should come clean and give everyone rebate for the period when they were generating erroneous bills. If Hydro continues to insist they made no errors, we need manual audits by an independent body. They know perfectly well they made an error, because they corrected it. Computer programs don’t just fix themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)