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Will the Smart Grid Compromise Privacy?

By Kennedy Maize

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2009 — This blog has highlighted my concerns about the security of the smart grid for many months. Now, there’s a new potential problem with the smart grid: privacy.

Washington Post technology security writer Brian Krebs, in a recent posting, notes that “privacy experts are warning that the so-called ‘smart grid’ efforts could usher in a new class of concerns, as utilities begin collecting more granular data about consumers’ daily power consumption.”

Krebs points to a study this month by the Ontario, Canada, Information and Privacy Commissioner, and the Future of Privacy Forum. The study, “Smart Privacy for the Smart Grid: Embedding Privacy into the Design of Electricity Conservation,” observes, “Modernization of the grid will increase the level of personal information detail available as well as the instances of collection, use and disclosure of personal information. Instead of measuring energy use at the end of each billing period, smart meters will provide this information at much shorter intervals.”

That sort of information, says the report, can be gathered and used or sold. “Electric utilities and other providers may have access to information about what customers are using, when they are using it, and what devices are involved,” says the study. “An electricity usage profile could become a source of behavioral information on a granular level.”

In September, the Cyber Security Coordination Task Group, chartered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a Commerce Department agency, offered a “privacy impact assessment” of the various smart grid concepts. Among the conclusions:

* The entities involved in formulating the smart grid lack privacy standards.

* Electric utilities don’t have consistent policies about personally-identifiable information.

* Few state regulators have considered the privacy implications of a smart grid, despite a National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ 2000 regulation calling for such oversight.

* Distributed energy and smart meters will reveal personal information, and roaming smart devices, such as plug-in hybrid cars recharging at a friend’s house, will reveal additional personal information.

The Canadian report identifies some of the types of information that the smart grid might display: “Whether individuals tend to cook microwavable meals or meals on the stove; whether they have breakfast; the time at which individuals are at home; whether a house has an alarm system and how often it is activated; when occupants usually shower; when the TV and/or the computer is on; whether appliances are in good condition; the number of gadgets in the home; if the home has a washer and dryer and how often they are used; whether lights and appliances are used at off hours, such as the middle of the night; whether and how often exercise equipment such as a treadmill is used.”

This is all obviously commercially-useful information, not just in aggregate but also specific to a household. Grappling with the privacy question is another task that must be solved before the smart grid can appear in any major rollout.

I’ve said it before — and I suspect I will be saying it again, multiple times — that I prefer a strong grid to a smart grid. I don’t care nearly as much about how my local utility – Allegheny Energy – cycles my heat pump. I care a lot more about whether the heat pump comes on when I want it in the winter and summer. Gimme muscles in my grid, not smarts.

Kick the Can on Energy Policy: Bravo

By Kennedy Maize

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2009 — Call it “kick the can.” The Obama administration, according to the New York Times, has persuaded (does than mean big-footed?) the rest of the world attending the upcoming Copenhagen climate change confab to adopt a policy duck. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and defecates like a duck.

Acknowledging that there is not enough political support for global warming legislation in the U.S. Congress (it’s clear that the Obama administration’s energy legislation would not command even 50 votes in the Senate), the White House is looking for a way to save international face in Copenhagen in December. Their approach is a familiar “declare victory and bring the troops home” strategy.

The Times’s Helene Cooper, an excellent reporter, wrote on Nov. 14, “ President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific ‘politically binding’ agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.”

Just what does “politically binding” mean? The answer must be: Not binding in any way. It’s a classic duck. As several commentators have noted, the administration cannot commit to international rules that don’t face congressional scrutiny. They can’t bind anybody to anything.

What the administration and other world leaders have agreed to, in advance of the Copenhagen meeting, is a political veil that essentially covers nothing. It is policy dressed up as striptease. It reveals a lot, but ultimately accomplishes nothing. “Politically binding?” Give me a break. The construct is inherently oxymoronic.

Clearly many world leaders believe that there is political advantage in a worldwide attempt to attack carbon dioxide emissions – a follow-on to the failed 1997 Kyoto Treaty (to which the U.S. Senate, after Vice President Al Gore brokered the deal, correctly flipped a 95-0 political bird to the treaty). There is no doubt, as I read it, that world leaders believe that international approaches to global warming won’t work. In other words, there is worldwide cynicism directed at anything that might come out of Copenhagen. But they can’t admit that.

Don’t read me wrong here. I think any international agreement on global warming is a charade. So if Copenhagen fails, that’s good news as I read it. Global agreements to deal with an environmental issue that is undefined and unmeasurable, but incredibly costly to taxpayers without a clear benefit, aren’t a good idea. Let’s attack real problems. How about malaria control, potable water, and access to electricity?

I chuckle at the inability of the U.S. administration to implement its flawed approach to the subject. If the climate problem is real – which I doubt – the solution is clearly not a worldwide regulatory regime that, by every analysis, won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Cap-and-trade on a worldwide basis enriches traders who can take advantage of securitized pollution positions, but won’t ultimately reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly.

So it’s fine by me that the administration has adopted a strategy that essentially says, “Let’s kick the can down the road and see what happens next.” That’s a practical policy. It works. It make sense to me.

Yucca Mountain is Dead and Gone

By Kennedy Maize

I come not to praise Yucca Mountain as a final repository for spent nuclear fuel, but to bury it. The lid on the Yucca coffin has long been in place, but now the Obama administration is nailing it down, according to a report in The Energy Daily. That’s good news.

The newsletter account says that the Department of Energy in December will abandon its license application at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Nevada waste dump. Energy Daily says it has obtained documents outlining the Obama administration’s plan to sink Yucca Mountain for good. I have no reason to challenge that reporting.

Energy Daily reports that the Yucca obituary will come in DOE’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposal, which the administration will submit to Congress in early 2010. The budget request, according to the report, will say, “All license defense activities will be terminated in December 2009.”

It’s about time. The choice of Yucca Mountain was the result of a rigged, political process that could not help but come up with a bogus site for spent nuclear fuel. I’ve been arguing this case since Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

The act, concocted by the late Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.,) chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was built on a familiar but unsustainable premise: let’s put lots of regions at risk, and they will have to come up with a compromise. So the bill established a goal of deep geological storage of “high level” waste (initially spent nuclear fuel and later some bomb wastes), and set up a competition among various geological areas of the country for the storage.

There was salt, basalt, tuff, and granite. There would be two rounds of site characterization, carried out by the staff at DOE. Udall’s mantra was “spread the pain.” The nuclear waste program would be financed by a special tax on atomic generation.

The Udall bill also set up a system where the governor of a state with a candidate for the repository could veto the selection, with Congress able to override the veto. It was a recipe for the staggering follies of the next 27 years.

As J. Samuel Walker, the official historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, noted in his 2009 book The Road to Yucca Mountain, “It was soon clear that the law did not provide the solution that optimists had predicted. DOE, in accordance with the requirements of the law, conducted environmental evaluations of possible disposal sites and selected five leading candidates: salt deposits in Mississippi, Texas, and Utah, basalt formations at Hanford [Washington], and tuff rock in Nevada.”

In May 1986, then Energy Secretary John Herrington, fearing losses in the upcoming national elections, particularly in the second-round candidate states, mostly in New England, suspended the second round of site characterizations. Herrington limited the sites to Texas, Hanford, and Yucca Mountain, in Nevada. He essentially signed a death sentence for the 1982 law.

Enter influential journalist Luther Carter of Science magazine, who suggested short-stopping the whole convoluted process and mandating storage at Yucca Mountain, where Uncle Sam already owned the land and the geology looked promising. Bennett Johnston, a nuclear advocate who had already inserted legislative language protecting Louisiana salt deposits against being candidates for nuclear waste storage, jumped on Carter’s proposal.

In 1987, Johnson sponsored the what the little-known, junior Democratic member of the U.S. Senate from Nevada, Harry Reid, dubbed the “Screw Nevada” bill. Congress passed the legislation, which stopped further site studies and pointed the government’s finger, you can guess which one, at Yucca Mountain.

But over the next 20 years, Nevada and other opponents of siting at Yucca Mountain were able to play a brilliant game of “stall ball,” dragging out the process with well-founded technical and political objections to the Nevada site. During the Clinton administration, the road to Yucca Mountain got clogged with political obstacles and technical objections. It didn’t get smoother during the George W. Bush years.

Who knew that Harry Reid would become a Democratic colossus? A two-term, back-bench member of the U.S. House, in 1986 Reid won election to the Senate against a former Democratic House member Jim Santini, turned Republican. Reid easily won reelection in 1992, and narrowly escaped a Republican landslide in 1998.

After serving as a successful Senate Democratic whip (vote counter and organizer) for several years, in 2005 Reid succeeded South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, who was defeated in 2004, as Democratic leader. When the Democrats recaptured the U.S. Senate in 2006, Reid became Senate majority leader. All the while, he made his opposition to Yucca Mountain a key to his home-state appeal.

When President Obama was running for the White House in 2008, he made it clear that he would support Reid on killing Yucca Mountain. Now, the administration has paid off on its promise.

What comes next? Probably a lot of dithering and feckless hand-wringing. The Bush administration understood that Yucca was dead political meat and was looking at some sort of allegedly-benign fuel reprocessing as the waste solution. That didn’t work.

Look for the Obama administration to appoint a “blue ribbon” panel of experts to come up with a proposal in a couple of years. In the meantime, spent nuclear fuel will remain at reactor sites. That’s not a bad outcome, as I’ve argued for more than a decade. The NRC says the fuel is safe. What else is required?

I’ve been writing variants of this screed for more than two decades. I hope this is the last I have to write about nuclear waste at least until I get into the retirement home.

Smart Grid Grants May be Stupid

By Kennedy Maize

President Obama in late October announced that the Department of Energy would award $3.4 billion in grants to allegedly “smart grid” technologies. As I parse the awards, my reaction is that they are fundamentally stupid.

Most of the money – to be matched by the private sector (those matches presumably are tax deductible and, for utilities, recoverable in customer rates) – goes to installation of smart meters. Why is federal stimulus needed for smart metering? Many utilities over the past couple of decades have seen it in their economic interest to install various versions of smart meters, including the obvious advantage of remote meter reading.

The smart grid sounds cool, trendy, and hip. It is, as I have expressed before, a distraction from the more important goal of a strong, fully-interconnected grid. The smart grid federal funds strike me as grandstanding, not something that Uncle Sam needs to fund to advance the national interest.

The real grid problem is the gridlock (that’s the correct term) between the states and the federal government over high-voltage interstate commerce. Congress tried – with typical half-measures – and failed to address that problem in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Fiddling around with the undefined “smart grid” in response to that failure – a tactic promoted by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is trolling for a new mission and research dollars – strikes me as misguided.

Pardon me if I think the awards are political. The single largest grant – or loan, if you believe that loans without collateral or interest are really loans – is in, surprise, Delaware, where DOE will put up $528 million to reopen a General Motors plant in Wilmington, employing 2,000 union workers at a Fisker Automotive plant to make high-end electric cars. The plant had produced sporty two-seaters for Pontiac and Saturn, both brands that GM has now jettisoned.

Based in California, Fisker has yet to roll out its cars for the auto market. The company plans to produce a mid-sized, luxury four-door, plug-in hybrid in 2012, at some $89,000 a copy. That’s for a car that will run 50 miles on electricity before switching to gasoline. But it qualifies for major smart grid money from Washington to make someday-to-be commercial cars in Delaware. What this has to do with smart grid technology frankly escapes me.

But I get the politics. Vice President Joe Biden, a former Democratic senator from Delaware, surely had something to do with this award. That’s particularly true because his son Beau Biden, Delaware’s attorney general, likely is running to fill his father’s former senate seat next year, against Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), the only Republican who has been able to win statewide in recent years (Delaware has only one House seat). Castle, a moderate Republican (is that an oxymoron?) was also governor (1984-1992).

The White House denies that the Delaware award has anything to do with politics. And Claude Rains as Inspector Renault in Casablanca (1942) was “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling at Rick’s Place. At which point, a croupier handed Renault a fist-full of cash.

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Will the Smart Grid Compromise Privacy?

Kick the Can on Energy Policy: Bravo

Yucca Mountain is Dead and Gone

Smart Grid Grants May be Stupid

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