The relationship between privacy issues and smart metering was always going to be fraught with concern. As such, I was interested to read this article which includes a summary of some of the key issues being faced in Canada and Netherlands. Firstly, to Canada, where law-enforcers have monitored energy usage as part of gathering evidence against suspected marijuana growers. Clever, eh? However, in court, the judge dismissed the ammeter as a source of evidence for reasons of invasion of privacy; it transpired that the police hadn’t obtained the necessary search warrant to use it. Not such a smart move after all.

Secondly, to the Netherlands, where the smart meter rollout has been postponed after fiery debate over the potential risk to privacy posed by remote energy monitoring. However, the opposing view runs along the lines of ‘the privacy threat from smart meters is grossly exaggerated’. Issues around data security, data ownership and data access are huge, though this debate is yet to properly, if you’ll forgive the colloquialism, ‘kick-off’ in the UK.

The article also notes that that although both consumers and energy companies could benefit from the deployment of smart technology ‘the case for smart meters…hasn’t been helped by the way that they have been ‘sold’ to consumers by Government and utility companies alike’. I agree to a certain extent with this and have noted before about the importance of getting consumers on-board to enable a successful roll-out. In that particular posting, I cited New Zealand. The issues faced there, and in the countries mentioned above, need to be carefully considered in the months and years ahead to best avoid the potential minefield of mistakes and controversies.

Tags: smart meters

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Energy and Environment, Private Sector. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.