As of July 31, state regulators had received 4,169 complaints from PG&E customers about the wireless electricity and gas meters, questioning their accuracy and possible effects on human health. Southern California Edison customers, in contrast, filed 152 smart meter complaints with the California Public Utilities Commission. Customers of San Diego Gas and Electric Co. filed just 78 complaints.
The difference could be due, at least in part, to the size and timing of each utility's smart meter program. PG&E, based in San Francisco, has more customers than any other California utility and was the first in the state to start installing the advanced meters. "We've been a pioneer on smart meters," the company's chief executive officer, Peter Darbee, said this month at a public forum on energy issues. "Pioneers take a lot of arrows." And yet the difference seems disproportional considering the substantial number of meters the other utilities have installed. While PG&E has deployed 6.5 million meters throughout Northern and Central California since 2007, Edison has installed 1.3 million and SDG&E, 1.2 million since 2009.
Michael Shames, director of a consumer watchdog group in San Diego, said his organization has received just a handful of smart meter complaints, fewer than he expected."It's a very different experience than what you've had there with PG&E," said Shames, with the Utility Consumers' Action Network. "It's surprising how the issues with PG&E don't seem to have spread."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/24/BU9M1F0U5P.DTL#ixzz0yNbspvHj
