This one sentence sums it up:

After months of denying any technical problems with its SmartMeter program, PG&E publicly detailed a range of glitches Monday affecting tens of thousands of the digital meters.

[From PG&E details technical problems with SmartMeters – San Jose Mercury News]

This is the first time that PG&E has publicly acknowledged technical problems with the meters, and I’m wondering why it took 43,376 confirmed problems for them to admit this program has problems. Given the willful obstruction by PG&E in acknowledging the problems with smart meters, it’s outright laughable that PG&E can be trusted with auditing and reporting smart meter reliability testing and problem resolution.

As I wrote last year, the closed system nature of utility smart meters in California risked making them the new e-voting machines when it came to trust and public support. PG&E has accomplished turning that risk into reality.

My own experience with smart meters indicates that something is very wrong… my bills remain significantly higher and comparing monthly consumption to previous year bills (non smart meter enabled) details higher consumption in current periods. The problem is that nothing in our physical house or family patterns has changed. There is simply no reasonable explanation for why my current period consumption is higher than years past so Occam’s Razor would suggest that the meter is wrong, or the old meter was wrong… and if the latter then a reasonable expectation would be that consumers are grandfathered into their old bills rather than absorbing the financial impact of a utility fixing a long standing inaccuracy.

[Editor’s Note: Jeff Nolan cross-posted this to his personal blog. –mrh]