In Which I Testify off the Hill

We speak in the DC think tank biz about going to "testify on the Hill." You know what that means. Just now I testified off the Hill, before the City Council, in my capacity as someone who lives on the Hill. The local utility, PEPCO, is on the verge of spending $90 million to install "smart" meters in all DC homes. About half of that is stimulus money. I gather the meters will allow access to real-time information about energy usage. Maybe we'll be able to monitor our power production on the web. Instant feedback about energy use is a good thing. The meters would also make it possible for PEPCO to charge higher rates at peak times: also good for economic efficiency.Trouble is, these meters are not so smart that they know how to count backwards. Mine needs to in order to reflect the fact that I will often generate more power than I consume with my new solar panels.The selection criteria for being a witness at the hearing were: you have to live in DC; and you have to ask to testify. That combination was irresistible to my inner pontificator.Here's what I said:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is David Roodman and I am a DC homeowner and a member of the Capitol Hill Energy Co-op. I recently had solar panels installed on my roof. They work great, but I can’t use them yet because I am still waiting for PEPCO to install a net meter. It’s been almost 4 weeks and counting, waiting for a 10-minute procedure. Actually, I already have a modern digital meter. I turned my panels on for an hour a few weeks ago. What happened was pretty funny. The digital equivalent of the second hand on my meter went backwards as it should, but the equivalent of the minute hand—the kilowatt-hour counter—just went forward even faster. So PEPCO as charging me for power I was giving it! So that’s what happens when a digital meter that is not a net meter meets solar power. Not very smart. But I’m afraid it’s an apt symbol for where we’re headed with “smart meters.”I would like to thank the Council for its role in supporting the mini-boom in solar power in DC. It’s nice to have the panels on my roof, but ultimately the beneficiaries are my children, your children, all of us who live with cleaner air as a result. I understand that there are plans for a $90 million program to install “smart meters” in DC. I think the goal of giving people real-time information on their usage is great. Except these high-tech, digital meters apparently aren’t as smart as my seven-year-old, who knows how to count backwards.This is absurd. We face a climate crisis. Our atmosphere is shifting into a state unprecedented in the history of our species. We may feel insulated from nature by our technology. But we are not. The food you eat today comes from the sun and the rain.I believe that the world must (within reasonable bounds) move quickly to harvest renewable energy whenever and wherever it can. Almost every day, energy from the sun pours onto this building and all the buildings of DC. But we slough it off, preferring to pay coal mining companies to lop the tops off West Virginia’s mountains and dump the toxic waste into her valleys.That is why, I believe, that most energy visionaries see a place in our future for distributed generation; they see a world in which the old wall between consumer and producer is torn down. The change is akin to the arrival of electronic social networking, which empowers all of us to be not just readers but authors too. Thanks in part to the DC grant program for solar power, a rapidly growing group of DC voters has demonstrated its enthusiasm for the distributed model. If you think about it, this is about democratizing our energy system—literally spreading the power around.Since to whom much is given much is expected, the United States should lead the way in the global effort to change. And DC should lead the way for the nation. Indeed, there has already been great symbolic value in solar power doing so well in the center of our nation’s power.So if you take the climate crisis seriously, and you are about to make a large and ideally farsighted investment in our energy infrastructure, then you have to support net metering. Smart meters that can’t run backwards are dumb. More than that, they are morally irresponsible.As far as I understand, there is no technical barrier to letting the new meters run backwards by default. Digital electronics are governed by software, which is plastic. So the way things are going now is like running a crash program to give every DC child a laptop—that can receive e-mail, but not send it. Sure, the laptops can be reprogrammed to send e-mail too. But to do that, you’ll need to file a form with the government and then wait for who knows how many weeks for a technician to visit your house and manually reprogram it.Of course PEPCO has little interest in net metering, which facilitates competition from the likes of me. Everyone likes competition in theory, until it happens to them. So it is your job to protect the public interest. The way I see it, you can either let this program go forward as is, in which case it will to a degree become a white elephant, one more wasteful DC government program that people will someday roll their eyes at. Or you can do it with genuine foresight. Remember the question at hand is not whether there will be a large demand for net meters. It is simply whether there might be. Since the costs of keeping this option open should be trivial now, and the potential value huge, the choice should be easy. I bet even those meters PEPCO wants to install could figure it out.