The Smart Grid
Energy Scarcity by Design
By: Jim Jensen
Part I is an introduction to the smart grid and the plan for implementation. Part II is an in-depth look at the campaign to wrest power from consumers.
Part II | Withholding Power from the People
II. Developing Energy Storage
The big problem bludgeoning our current grid is the erratic production of energy that comes from renewables like solar and wind. Remember, our current grid meets demand in real time. If electricity is generated and not used, it goes to waste. That is, unless you can put it in a battery.
As demonstrated by Tesla, battery technology has come a long way in the last decade. The problem is that powerful, rechargeable batteries are very expensive. Check the price tag on battery replacement for a cheap Chevy Volt. It’s approaching $30K.
So, who is going to pay for all the storage of excess electricity generated by your solar panels? Hint: it’s not the utility company nor the government. It’s you. Surprise!
According to the PowerGrid International website, “utility-controlled residential batteries is a blueprint for an authentic energy transition” away from fossil fuels. The most successful residential battery program in the nation right now is being run by Rocky Mountain Power (RMP). When you read the program detail, it’s alarming.
Rocky Mountain Power, they brag online, “is directly controlling more residential batteries dynamically and on a daily basis, than any utility-controlled battery consumer program in the nation.” In case you skimmed over that, your battery, that you’re paying top dollar for, is not really “yours.” It’s controlled by the utility. When you read about the Wattsmart program, you learn they refer to your solar/battery system as a “resource” that they can “utilize.” Why is it that everything with the word “smart” in it has to do with someone taking control of some aspect of your life?
When you sign up for this awesome program, you must agree that RMP can make “daily use” of your “customer-sited” battery from March through October. They will only use your storage in the winter months for grid “emergencies.” Reading between the lines, it sounds like during the winter months your solar panels are barely putting enough excess electricity into the battery to get you through the night.
In a further mind-blowing caveat, RMP says batteries are capable of supplying backup power during outages, although your specific installation needs to be designed to provide backup power. (Let’s guess: that’s gonna cost extra.) If your battery system doesn’t provide backup power during an outage, what does it do? It seems like that should be a default configuration. But, it makes more sense if you remember that you are just financing the battery, you don’t actually control it.
Only German-made sonnen batteries are accepted in the Wattsmart program currently. To get one that can store a day’s worth of energy (30kWH), you’ll likely to pay about $36,000 (probably more than your solar panels). The behemoth weighs in at 1,250 pounds and, according to their marketing material, makes a lovely living room accoutrement. The best thing about these batteries is that they come with a 15-year warranty. The downside is that $36K amortized for 15 years at 3% interest is about $250/month.
The value proposition for solar panels isn’t that they will save you money on your electricity bill. They are priced such that diverting your electricity expense to Sun Run for 25 years will just cover them. And then, assuming they are still functional, you will start saving money. You’d have to be pretty darn patriotic to the planet to sign up for a $36,000 battery plus another $25,000 in solar panels with the hopes of saving a few bucks at some point in the future.
If this deal isn’t very appealing, you could sign up for a 100% electric home powered by smart grid technologies in Birmingham, England. A developer is building 350 of them in a cute little hive. Each comes with solar panels (we hear they have great weather for those in the UK), a battery, and an EV charger. The benefit of these “sustainable” homes is that they have a carbon negative footprint and produce more energy than they consume. And they could reduce a household’s total energy bills by more than 50%.
Huh? You purchase an asset that produces more energy than it consumes, and it might save you 50% on your energy bill? If your home produces more energy than it consumes, shouldn’t your energy bill be zero? Your mortgage might be higher, but your energy bill should be gonzo. And what happens with the extra energy it produces? It gets sucked into the grid because the grid is smart. Apparently, you’re paying the utility company for the luxury of taking your extra energy.
Smart grifters gridders, also have their eyes on the battery in your EV. As per, they view your car battery as their resource that they control. It’s a paradox for them that their beloved electric vehicles will destroy the existing grid, but could also save it.
Mohammed Beshir is a professor of electrical engineering at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering and has been studying how EVs might impact the grid for the better part of a decade. He says, “If each home on a block gets one electric vehicle, that’s probably equivalent to double that block’s existing power load.” Obviously, this is a big problem coming like a tsunami for the current electrical grid.
One solution they have for us is coordinated charging. In a smart grid, a utility can control where electricity goes. So, if they can sell electricity at a higher rate somewhere else, they can pause the charging on your vehicle. Basically, if someone else needs electricity more than you, your EV will take longer to charge. The nice thing about this solution is that the elite can always have top priority on vehicle charging.
While you might consider it annoying that your vehicle could take longer to charge on a smart grid, it actually gets worse. People like Beshir consider the battery in your EV as a storage asset for the utility company. So, if pausing the electricity flow to your vehicle isn’t enough to meet other demands, on a smart grid, the utility could flip a switch and start drawing from your vehicle’s battery instead.
Having millions of car batteries out there on a smart grid can also help utilities when electricity prices go negative. During periods of unusually high renewable production (think sunny, windy days) or times of very low usage (think Christmas), the supply of electricity produced can exceed the demand. Since electricity must be used the moment it’s generated, and cannot be stored at scale, wholesale prices can go negative. This means that producers must pay wholesalers to take it.
With a smart grid, utilities can activate battery charging in response to the grid’s need for end-use consumption. In other words, everyone pays to have their EV and residential batteries topped off, because you can be sure the negative price will never be passed through to consumers. The main beneficiary is the utility.
What it really boils down to is that when you put something on the smart grid, you are no longer in control of it. But if you think having them control your home and car battery is overreach, their plan gets much worse.
III. Controlling consumption with demand response
The existential problem being addressed by a smart grid is not that our current grid is doomed. Without the introduction of erratic, renewable sources of energy, there is little doubt that the grid would advance and evolve organically in a way that could support all our needs.
But their thinking goes like this: The earth is warming rapidly, caused by the gases emitted from fossil fuels. We must immediately eliminate coal and oil or we’re all going to die.
But wait, you ask, don’t we rely on petroleum for almost all our energy?
Yes, so we will find a way to replace them. As inefficient and unpredictable as solar and wind resources are, we will bolt them onto the grid designed for traditional producers, never mind that the existing grid was not designed to coordinate and safely manage large numbers of distributed energy resources. Like DOE says, “we need a plan, disruptive or not.”
A logical person might wonder, but what about calm, overcast days when renewables can’t meet demand?
Very good question. One answer might be, let’s move slowly toward net zero carbon until we can either improve the efficiency of renewables or invent another clean source that can contribute. But no, the answer of the smart gridders is, we must stop using oil and gas immediately. If sun and wind can’t produce enough energy, then . . . demand must be too high. That’s it! We must find a way to control how and when all these pesky humans consume electricity.
Enter demand response. Demand response is a sophisticated way of saying that when our plan is failing, we’ll control consumption to respond to the grid crisis.
It starts with “smart meters” and ends with “smart” everything. Our current electricity meters, that have been fixtures on the side of our house for as long as we can remember, affectionately known as “dumb” meters, have one job: they measure the amount of electricity flowing into our house.
Smart meters have two jobs. They measure electricity consumption in detail and send it back to the utility. It’s a two-way flow of data. The smart meters can tell the utility when we use electricity, how much we use, and ultimately, what kind of smart devices are using it. Utilities are justifying this data land grab by telling us how cool it is that we can see our hourly usage.
Smart meters in and of themselves are not the problem, unless you’re concerned about living next to a powerful source of EM radiation, but that’s another story. They are, however, another step in a very wrong direction. Have you noticed that a lot of your home appliances have been coming with wireless connectivity lately? And not just things like Alexa and Home Pods. But clothes dryers, ovens, and refrigerators? Why would your oven need access to the internet?
The answer is that all of these “smart” devices will end up communicating with your smart meter, which communicates directly with your supplier of electricity. Once that is in place, whoever controls the utility will control your consumption and, voila! . . . demand response.
Sound far-fetched? Sound too dystopian? Here’s what Rocky Mountain Power says about the benefits of smart meters: “During high-use periods, for example, new meters can help the grid shift power to where it’s needed, avoiding brown-outs by preventing the grid from being overloaded.”
Let’s break that down. High-use periods are when demand is at it’s peak. Shifting power means reducing demand. Power isn’t just sitting latent in the grid waiting for someone to tell it where to go. Avoiding brown-outs sounds good, but they don’t say they are going to avoid them by routing energy from your solar panels to meet demand. They are going to prevent overload. The only way to do that is to reduce consumption or drain batteries to gather the needed volts.
There is a huge push by smart gridders to get “behind the meter.” Smart appliances make the smart grid possible. For example, an electric sprinkler system can be programmed to run “only when electricity costs are low.” This suggests a supply and demand model for electricity distribution and pricing. When demand is low, cost is low. Electric appliances would have to be rated on their essentiality. For example, a microwave could be considered more essential than a lawn sprinkler. Powering “essential” appliances takes priority. But who determines the hierarchy of appliances? Will you have any say?
For a glimpse into dystopia, peruse smartgrid.gov. In directives aimed at utilities, you find topics like “Detecting and Forecasting Behind-the-Meter Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) Impacts.” Smart meters will provide power and power-quality information for all devices at the customer interconnection locations. What is “power information?” It’s consumption information.
The government is telling utilities they have a “critical need” to understand dispersed, variable components and “ensure that sufficient visibility and control can be maintained.” Sensing technologies need to be more “ubiquitously deployed” at distribution and end-use levels. They want “real-time” observation, with data collection, of the status of all dispersed energy resources (solar panels, batteries, EVs, etc.)
Electronic devices can now be fitted with “variable-speed drives.” This feature can reduce a motor’s energy consumption by up to 60% compared with fixed drives and can be “enabled to respond to a utility’s price signals.” This means behind-the-meter devices are conferring with the grid. The variable speed motor can be programmed to run slower when the price of electricity (i.e., demand) is high.
Or, by extension, devices can be made to not run when demand is really high. At that point, all the utility has to do is set prices at a certain level and your electrical stuff doesn’t work.
The DOE says demand response is a “means by which demand will be dynamically and continuously balanced with supply-side resources to reduce price volatility.” They are 100% talking about controlling demand here. They aren’t even hiding it.
Devices such as industrial and domestic air conditioners, refrigerators, and heaters will adjust their duty cycle to avoid activation during times the grid is suffering a peak condition. Or, as this funny example given by the globalist elite authors on Wikipedia says, “if a popular television program starts, millions of televisions will start to draw current instantly. A smart grid may warn all individual television sets, or another larger customer, to reduce the load temporarily.” How does a television reduce its load on the grid? It turns off. Or, perhaps even more annoyingly, the volume goes down or the picture dims in what you could call a controlled brownout.
A smart grid also gives utilities the ability to reduce consumption by communicating with devices directly. It could, for example, reduce the usage of a group of electric vehicle charging stations, or shift temperature set points of air conditioners in a city. Shifting temperature set points mean that if you like your thermostat set at 78 on really hot days, they could communicate with your Nest and bump it up a couple degrees. Or, just switch your A/C off if need be.
On a September 2022 episode of CBS Prime Time, California Energy Commission member, Siva Gunda, confirmed what the nature of the demand response programs will look like. “Load reduction programs,” as they are called, “are not just sending out texts to tell people not to turn on the lights—or to turn them off . . . but they are automatic systems that, given a signal, will lower the air conditioning, stop the washer, and do it automatically.”
The bottom line is they want to get behind the meter so they can leverage “demand response programs” to solve the destabilization woes caused by their push for renewables. The entire smart grid project is a giant effort on the part of governments to convince utilities to tell consumers they need to change their buying habits based on the utilities’ growing inability to continue the level of service we have enjoyed in the past.
Some believe that the DOE is already signaling regulators to reduce their expectation for reliability, which is “often set at a high level in the traditional energy system dominated by fossil fuel.” Others are suggesting that setting new standards at the national and global level (United Nations?) will be particularly important. They say establishment of “lead agencies” (World Economic Forum?) to coordinate efforts at various levels of governments would facilitate sub-standardization.
This is a very anti-capitalist solution. It has red, hammer, and sickle markings all over it. Instead of investing in how to generate power more cleanly and abundantly, world governments are bringing the full force of their money-printing machines to bear on finding ways to control demand and limit consumption. If you want to control the world, you have to control individuals. What better way to get a grip on power than withhold power from people?
Why else would governments be getting so massively involved using the fear tactics of global warming and terrorist attacks to justify spending trillions of dollars to get this done? @KanekoaTheGreat summed it up perfectly in a Telegram post, “The green energy movement is designed to produce energy scarcity within a digitally monitored smart grid connecting electricity, gas, and energy usage to citizens’ digital IDs.”
The nice thing about joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists is that you always end up being right in the end. After suffering through the fabricated COVID response for two years, there is no bridge too far. Belgian professor Mattias Desmet postulated in his new book Psychology of Totalitarianism “the idea that the corona crisis was primarily a psycho-social phenomenon that marked the transition to a technocratic system, a system in which the government would attempt to claim decision-making rights over its citizens and, step by step, take control of all private space.”[i]
There are thousands of people conspiring, right now, to control every aspect of our life and a smart grid victory would be a massive coup d’état for them.
What can we do?
Is there any silver lining to all this? Actually, there is: microgrids.
A microgrid is self-sustaining network of power generation and consumption. For example, a university campus or hospital could have its own generators and solar panels which enable it to detach from the utility grid and operate self-sufficiently as an island. The technology in microgrids makes energy consumption cheaper for households than buying from utilities.
We should be moving in this direction and away from the idea of centralizing control in the hands of bureaucrats in their ivory tower who get off on adjusting your thermostat. Isn’t it already hard enough with two people disagreeing about where the thermostat should be set?
Microgrids can decentralize the generation and management of the grid down to the city or neighborhood level. We should be turning this grid technology back on them and forming our own microgrids that can detach from the control freaks. That way we can use the power we need, when we need it. Even when the wind stops blowing in Texas.
We encourage freedom-loving people evergreen to be alert to this forced death march into communist control of our energy. The answer can’t be more global oversight, standards, and agencies. We need to do whatever it takes to elect representatives who understand innovation and the power of smart and free Americans to solve our problems with more convenience and choice, not le
[i] https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/some-notes-on-the-tragicomic-attempt