Stop Smart Meters Australia

Stop Smart Meters Australia (SSMA) has had reports from United Energy customers who have received the latest in United Energy’s series of highly convoluted notices concocted by its “clever” spin doctors. This latest notice from United Energy (aka Serial Corporate Bully) is entitled ‘RE: Non Complying Meter’. See: UE July 2014 letter

Desperate people do desperate things and one thing clear is that this notice has been made to come across as a threat to “deny” the essential service of electricity in the same vein as previous threats were made to “cut” this essential service. Clearly intended to intimidate, this notice is a familiar ploy of United Energy’s, designed to make more people cave in to their agenda to install their unwanted devices onto private homes.

Contained within this latest notice are the following statements:

“Your existing meter is no longer compliant with the metering standard in Victoria. This may impact your power supply in the event that your meter is damaged as the result of either a network outage or a localised fault.”

So none of this even applies if your meter is not damaged. It would have to be a pretty significant outage event to actually damage the meter. Are they trying to persuade people with hypotheticals or fictitious scenarios that they have deviously contrived? You would not want to be in the shoes of any party who might deliberately cause such a scenario. We certainly don’t wish to point the finger. And that word “may” does appear quite often in all UE notices.

“In the past we have supplied you with information outlining the benefits of installing a smart meter. This includes UE’s ability to identify and manage network outages more efficiently. As you do not have a smart meter installed, should an outage occur at your property UE will not be immediately aware that you are off supply. Therefore, we will not be able to utilise the capability of the AMI network to identify and rectify your restoration in the same manner as other customers.”

Yes, we have always had to call them when there has been a fault. That’s why there is a faults phone number. As far as not being able to rectify and restore in the same manner as “other customers”, that is exactly how we want it. What it also means is that they cannot cut off our power and switch off our appliances in the manner that they could do to other customers; it also means they cannot transmit radiation through our houses and our bodies against our wills in the way they are now doing to other customers and it also means they cannot intrude into our private activities in the home in the way they have the capacity of doing with other customers.

“If you encounter a fault with your existing meter that leads to it requiring replacement, either through a localised event or as the result of a network outage (e.g. a voltage variation) UE will be unable to restore your power until a smart meter is installed. It is the Victorian Government’s policy that smart meters are the standard meters in Victoria.”

The issue of what is going to happen if an analogue meter breaks down was always going to be a bridge to be crossed but United Energy must restore power if there is an outage. Electricity is an essential service that must be restored to all customers regardless of whether a customer’s metering is accumulation or interval and United Energy cannot be allowed to get away with using the threat to deny essential service as a means of blackmailing its customers into relinquishing their rights.

Victorian legislation was recently passed permitting power companies to set fees to manually read meters, clearly indicating and accepting that two metering systems exist and will continue to exist in Victoria. See: Victorian Parliament Passes Energy Legislation Amendment Bill 2014.

It seems, however, the Victorian government and the power distributors remain complicit in aggressively pursuing an agenda to install wireless smart meters.