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The future of a €1bn project to install electricity and gas smart meters in all Irish homes and most Irish businesses by 2020 could be in doubt after a recent cost-benefit analysis indicated savings, if any, would be minimal. The report commissioned by the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER) — which is overseeing the planned rollout of the National Smart Metering Programme to more than 2m households — said the results were “marginally negative.”

In 2009, the Dutch government backed off plans for a mandatory smart meter deployment plan after a majority of Parliament members were convinced that the forced installation of smart meters would  violate the consumer’s right to privacy and would be in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Yesterday, the Government of Saskatchewan released the results of a scathing review for the fire and safety issues often referred to as “the smart meter debacle.” Yesterday’s report concluded that “Customer Safety Was Not Given Enough Priority.” “The primary issue of catastrophic meter failures which prompted the AMI program to be halted was not identified as an initial program risk.  When additional information about smart meter fires from other sources came to light, the risk of catastrophic meter failures did not prompt an independent reevaluation of the risk related to Sensus smart meters.”

At the Pagosa meeting, Michael Dreyspring, CEO of La Plata Electric Association, was in command for no more than two minutes and 40 seconds before the miffed residents of Pagosa Springs went volcanic and LPEA lost any semblance of control. As their pedantic power point presentation went up in flames, so did an outspoken and furious crowd.

The experiment of some doctoral students at Stanford is raising questions about the accuracy of PG&E's new SmartMeters. People all over the state have been complaining about them.

While it is generally true that an individual customer’s smart meter is programmed to transmit his or her energy-related data back to the utility once every few hours, that is an extremely small percentage of the actual number of transmissions per day.  The wireless smart meter performs many other functions, such as network management, time synchronization, and activities related to forwarding routed messages for other customers.  Smart meters chatter back and forth among each other throughout the day.

"'Smart' meters … indirectly leak private, and potentially valuable, information about a building’s occupants’ activities. To extract this information, third-party companies are now employing cloud-based, ‘big data’ platforms to analyze smart meter data en masse. While the purpose is, ostensibly, to provide consumers energy-efficiency recommendations, companies are mining the data for any profitable information."

Carole Garcia showed us the smart meters on the back of her Rochester Hills home. But she says, she's scared to stand near it for too long. "A bloody nose... headache... vertigo... insomnia," are the symptoms she says she has suffered from since she moved in.

A couple barely escaped a house fire with their lives in Detroit, Michigan, early Sunday morning, October 5th, 2014.  Sadly, their two dogs were killed in the blaze. The homeowner blames the recently installed smart meter for the fire. “It was DTE … why my dogs are dead, why my family is ruined, why I have no house, why I have nothing.”

European researchers will reveal later this month major security weaknesses in smart meters that could allow an attacker to order a power blackout.  A widely deployed smart meter device can be programmed to cause a power blackout or commit power usage fraud.