Despite all the operational, educational, and security advantages offered by a smart grid infrastructure, detractors point to its primary disadvantage: the costs are borne by us—the end users—since the government incentives to utilities come from our taxes. Plus, utilities will pass along the cost of new equipment, and the labor to install it, to us. We will also pay to maintain it. And, if that was not enough, as we become wiser energy managers, the utilities will likely sell less electricity, then charge us more to recover their loss of revenue. This will be especially true for publicly held utilities, since they have to show a healthy bottom line to the stockholders every quarter. Let’s hope that the savings to utilities from eliminating their armies of meter readers and from preventing loss of equipment by eliminating overload scenarios will offset the reduction in energy sales due to conservation.
