unEARTHed

THE BIRTH OF TECHNOCRACY

Smart Grid: The Implementation of Technocracy?

By Patrick Wood

Intro­duc­tion

According to the United Nations Gov­erning Council of the UN Envi­ron­mental Pro­gramme (UNEP),  “our dom­i­nant eco­nomic model may thus be termed a ‘brown economy.” UNEP’s clearly stated goalis to over­turn the “brown economy” and replace it with a “green economy”:

“A green economy implies the decou­pling of resource use and envi­ron­mental impacts from eco­nomic growth… These invest­ments, both public and pri­vate, pro­vide the mech­a­nism for the recon­fig­u­ra­tion of busi­nesses, infra­struc­ture and insti­tu­tions, and for the adop­tion of sus­tain­able con­sump­tion and pro­duc­tion processes.” [p. 2]

Sus­tain­able con­sump­tion? Recon­fig­uring busi­nesses, infra­struc­ture and insti­tu­tions? What do these words mean? They do not mean merely reshuf­fling the existing order, but rather replacing it with a com­pletely new eco­nomic system, one that has never before been seen or used in the his­tory of the world.

This paper will demon­strate that the cur­rent crisis of cap­i­talism is being used to imple­ment a rad­ical new eco­nomic system that will com­pletely sup­plant it. This is not some new idea cre­ated in the bowels of the United Nations: It is a revi­tal­ized imple­men­ta­tion of Tech­noc­racy that was thor­oughly repu­di­ated by the Amer­ican public in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression.

The Tech­nocrats have resur­faced, and they do not intend to fail a second time. Whether they suc­ceed this time will depend upon the intended ser­vants of Tech­noc­racy, the cit­i­zens of the world.

Indeed, the dark horse of the New World Order is not Com­mu­nism, Socialism or Fas­cism. It is Technocracy.

Back­ground

Founded by Howard Scott and M. King Hub­bert in 1932 during the Great Depres­sion, Tech­noc­racy pro­posed a rad­ical new solu­tion for the world’s eco­nomic ills. In 1932, Harry A. Porter wrote in Roo­sevelt and Tech­noc­racy,

“Just as the Ref­or­ma­tion estab­lished Reli­gious Freedom, just as the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence brought about our Polit­ical Freedom, Tech­noc­racy promises Eco­nomic Freedom.” [Fore­ward, iii]

Porter’s plan included aban­doning the gold stan­dard, sus­pending the stock exchanges and nation­al­izing rail­roads and public util­i­ties. Freedom notwith­standing, Porter then called for President-elect Franklin D. Roo­sevelt to be sworn in as Dic­tator rather than Pres­i­dent so that he could over­turn the existing eco­nomic system in favor of Technocracy:

“Drastic as these changes from the present order of things may be, they will serve their pur­pose if only to pave the way for the Eco­nomic Rev­o­lu­tion – and Tech­noc­racy.” (p. 63)

If Tech­noc­racy had truly been extin­guished before the onset of WWII, we would not be con­cerned about it today. How­ever, when Zbig­niew Brzezinski wrote Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Tech­netronic Era in 1968, it was essen­tially a Neo-Technocratic trea­tise calling for a fourth and final stage of world his­tory, or the Tech­netronic Era.

When David Rock­e­feller picked Brzezinski to co-found the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion in 1973, it was with the spe­cific goal to create a “New Inter­na­tional Eco­nomic Order.” Without some knowl­edge of his­toric Tech­noc­racy, exactly what the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion ulti­mately had in mind with such a goal could not pos­sibly have been understood.

Today, it is nec­es­sary to rethink these issues in order to deter­mine a) if this rad­ical move­ment is still oper­ating, b) what are their goals and c) how do they plan to achieve their goals.

In Carbon Cur­rency: A New Begin­ning for Tech­noc­racy?, the sub­ject of his­toric Tech­noc­racy was intro­duced in the con­text of cre­ating a new eco­nomic system based on energy accounting rather than price accounting. An energy-based accounting system uses “energy cer­tifi­cates,” or Carbon Cur­rency, instead of dol­lars or other fiat cur­ren­cies. Peri­odic and equal allo­ca­tions of avail­able energy are made to cit­i­zens, but they must be used within the defined time period before they reach an expi­ra­tion date. Fur­ther­more, the ability to own pri­vate prop­erty and accu­mu­late wealth would be deemed unnecessary.

The pressing and unan­swered ques­tion is how would such a Tech­no­cratic system actu­ally be implemented?

This paper will now address the strategy, tac­tical require­ments and progress of estab­lishing an energy-based Tech­nate in North America. [“Tech­nate” is the term used to describe the geo­graphic region oper­ated according to Tech­noc­racy. Thus, a North Amer­ican Tech­nate would include Canada, Mexico and the U.S. and they would all be under common control. ]

Require­ments

The Tech­noc­racy Study Course, written by Howard Scott and M. King Hub­bert in 1932, estab­lished a detailed frame­work for Tech­noc­racy in terms of energy pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion and usage.

According to Scott and Hub­bert, the dis­tri­b­u­tion of energy resources must be mon­i­tored and mea­sured in order for the system to work — and this is the key: mon­i­toring and mea­suring.

They wrote that the system must do the fol­lowing things:

• “Reg­ister on a con­tin­uous 24 hour-per-day basis the total net con­ver­sion of energy.
• “By means of the reg­is­tra­tion of energy con­verted and con­sumed, make pos­sible a bal­anced load.
• “Pro­vide a con­tin­uous inven­tory of all pro­duc­tion and consumption
• “Pro­vide a spe­cific reg­is­tra­tion of the type, kind, etc., of all goods and ser­vices, where pro­duced and where used
• “Pro­vide spe­cific reg­is­tra­tion of the con­sump­tion of each indi­vidual, plus a record and descrip­tion of the indi­vidual.” [Scott, Howard et al, Tech­noc­racy Study Source, p. 232]

In 1932, such tech­nology did not exist. Time was on the Technocrat’s side, how­ever, because this tech­nology does exist today, and it is being rapidly imple­mented to do exactly what Scott and Hub­bert spec­i­fied: Namely, to exhaus­tively mon­itor, mea­sure and con­trol every ampere of energy deliv­ered to con­sumers and busi­nesses on a system-wide basis.

It’s called: Smart Grid.

What is Smart Grid?

Smart Grid is a broad tech­nical term that encom­passes the gen­er­a­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion and con­sump­tion of elec­trical power, with an inclu­sion for gas and water as well. America’s aging power grid is increas­ingly fragile and inef­fi­cient. Smart Grid is an ini­tia­tive that seeks to com­pletely redesign the power grid using advanced dig­ital tech­nology, including the instal­la­tion of new, dig­ital meters on every home and busi­ness in the U.S.

These dig­ital meters pro­vide around-the-clock mon­i­toring of a consumer’s energy con­sump­tion using con­tin­uous 2-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the utility and the consumer’s prop­erty. Fur­ther­more, meters will be able to com­mu­ni­cate with elec­trical devices within the res­i­dence to gather con­sump­tion data and to con­trol cer­tain devices directly without con­sumer intervention.

According to a U.S. Depart­ment of Energy publication,

“The Depart­ment of Energy has been charged with orches­trating the whole­sale mod­ern­iza­tion of our nation’s elec­trical grid… Heading this effort is the Office of Elec­tricity Delivery and Energy Reli­a­bility. In con­cert with its cut­ting edge research and energy policy pro­grams, the office’s newly formed, multi-agency Smart Grid Task Force is respon­sible for coor­di­nating stan­dards devel­op­ment, guiding research and devel­op­ment projects, and rec­on­ciling the agendas of a wide range of stake­holders.” (See The Smart Grid: An Intro­duc­tion)

This is a rel­a­tively new ini­tia­tive, but it is racing for­ward at break­neck speed. The Office of Elec­tricity Delivery was cre­ated in 2003 under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, and ele­vated in stature in 2007 by cre­ating the posi­tion of Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Elec­tricity Delivery and Energy Reli­a­bility to head it.

It is not clearly stated who “charged” the Depart­ment of Energy to this task, but since the Sec­re­tary of Energy answers directly to the Pres­i­dent, it is assumed that it was a direc­tive from the Pres­i­dent. There cer­tainly was no Con­gres­sional direc­tive or mandate.

Imple­men­ta­tion

On October 27, 2009, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion unveiled its Smart Grid plan by awarding $3.4 bil­lion awarded to 100 Smart Grid projects. According to the Depart­ment of Energy’s press release, these awards will result in the instal­la­tion of:

• more than 850 sen­sors called ‘Phasor Mea­sure­ment Units” to mon­itor the overall power grid nationwide
• 200,000 smart transformers
• 700 auto­mated sub­sta­tions (about 5 per­cent of the nation’s total)
• 1,000,000 in-home dis­plays
• 345,000 load con­trol devices in homes

This is the “kick-start” of Smart Grid in the U.S. On Jan­uary 8, 2010, Pres­i­dent Obama unveiled an addi­tional $2.3 bil­lion Fed­eral funding pro­gram for the “energy man­u­fac­turing sector” as part of the $787 bil­lion Amer­ican Rein­vest­ment and Recovery Act. Funding had already been awarded to 183 projects in 43 states, pending Obama’s announcement.

One such project in the north­west is headed by Bat­telle Memo­rial Insti­tute, cov­ering five states and tar­geting 60,000 cus­tomers. The project was actu­ally devel­oped by the Bon­neville Power Admin­is­tra­tion (BPA), a fed­eral agency under­neath the Depart­ment of Energy. Since it is point­edly illegal for a fed­eral agency to apply for fed­eral funds, BPA passed the project off to Bat­telle, a non-profit and non-governmental orga­ni­za­tion (NGO), which was promptly awarded $178 million.

It is inter­esting to note that BPA takes credit for orig­i­nating the Smart Grid con­cept in the early 1990′s, which it termed “Energy Web.” You can see from BPA’s graphic depic­tion that it is com­pre­hen­sive in scope from pro­duc­tion to consumption.

According to Battelle’s August 27, 2009 press release,

“The project will involve more than 60,000 metered cus­tomers in Idaho, Mon­tana, Oregon, Wash­ington and Wyoming. Using smart grid tech­nolo­gies, the project will engage system assets exceeding 112 megawatts, the equiv­a­lent of power to serve 86,000 households.

‘The pro­posed demon­stra­tion will study smart grid ben­e­fits at unprece­dented geo­graphic breadth across five states, span­ning the elec­trical system from gen­er­a­tion to end-use, and con­taining many key func­tions of the future smart grid,’ said Mike Davis, a Bat­telle vice pres­i­dent. ‘The intended impact of this project will span well beyond tra­di­tional utility ser­vice ter­ri­tory bound­aries, helping to enable a future grid that meets pressing local, regional and national needs.’”

Bat­telle and BPA intend to work closely together and there is an obvious blur­ring as to who is really in con­trol of the project’s man­age­ment during the test period.

In a “For Internal Use Only” doc­u­ment written in August 2009, BPA offers talking points to its part­ners. It states that “Smart Grid tech­nology includes every­thing from inter­ac­tive appli­ances in homes to smart meters, sub­sta­tion automa­tion and sen­sors on trans­mis­sion lines.” [Emphasis added]

A Net­work of Things

As the World Wide Web (WWW) is to people, the Net­work of Things (NOT) is to appli­ances. This brand new tech­nology cre­ates a wire­less net­work between a broad range of inan­i­mate objects from shoes to refrig­er­a­tors. This con­cept is “shovel ready” for Smart Grid imple­men­ta­tion because appli­ances, meters and sub­sta­tions are all inan­i­mate items that tech­nocrats would have com­mu­ni­cating with each other.

For instance, In 2008 the Pacific North­west National Lab­o­ra­tory (PNNL) devel­oped this small cir­cuit board called a “Grid Friendly Appli­ance Con­troller.” According to a Depart­ment of Energy brochure,

“The GFA Con­troller devel­oped by Pacific North­west National Lab­o­ra­tory is a small cir­cuit board built into house­hold appli­ances that reduces stress on the power grid by con­tin­u­ally mon­i­toring fluc­tu­a­tions in avail­able power. During times of high demand, appli­ances equipped with the con­troller auto­mat­i­cally shut down for a short period of time, resulting in a cumu­la­tive reduc­tion that can main­tain sta­bility on the grid.”

According to PNNL’s website,

“The con­troller is essen­tially a simple com­puter chip that can be installed in reg­ular house­hold appli­ances like dish­washers, clothes washers, dryers, refrig­er­a­tors, air con­di­tioners, and water heaters. The chip senses when there is a dis­rup­tion in the grid and turns the appli­ances off for a few sec­onds or min­utes to allow the grid to sta­bi­lize. The con­trollers also can be pro­grammed to delay the restart of the appli­ances. The delay allows the appli­ances to be turned on one at a time rather than all at once to ease power restora­tion fol­lowing an outage.”

You can see how auto­matic actions are intended to be trig­gered by direct inter­ac­tion between objects, without human inter­ven­tion. The rules will be written by pro­gram­mers under the direc­tion of tech­nocrats who under­stand the system, and then down­loaded to the con­trollers as nec­es­sary. Thus, changes to the rules can be made on the fly, at any time and without the homeowner’s knowledge.

PNNL is not a pri­vate enter­prise, how­ever. It is “owned” by the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy and oper­ated by Bat­telle Memo­rial Institute!

All of this tech­nology will be enabled with Wi-Fi cir­cuitry that is iden­tical to the Wi-Fi-enabled net­work modems and routers com­monly used in homes and busi­nesses throughout the world. Wi-Fi  is a trade­mark of the Wi-Fi Alliance that refers to wire­less net­work sys­tems used in devices from per­sonal com­puters to mobile phones, con­necting them together and/or to the Internet.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, “the need for Smart Grid solu­tions is being driven by the emer­gence of dis­trib­uted power gen­er­a­tion and management/monitoring of con­sump­tion.” In their white paper, Wi-Fi for the Smart Grid, they list the spe­cific require­ments for inter­op­er­ability posted by the Depart­ment of Energy:

1. “Pro­vide two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion among grid users, e.g. regional market oper­a­tors, util­i­ties, ser­vice providers and consumers
2. “Allow power system oper­a­tors to mon­itor their own sys­tems as well as neigh­boring sys­tems that affect them so as to facil­i­tate more reli­able energy dis­tri­b­u­tion and delivery
3. “Coor­di­nate the inte­gra­tion into the power system of emerging tech­nolo­gies such as renew­able resources, demand response resources, elec­tricity storage facil­i­ties and elec­tric trans­porta­tion systems
4. “Ensure the cyber secu­rity of the grid.

Thus, the bi-directional and real time Smart Grid com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work will depend on Wi-Fi from end to end. This is easily under­stood from the two fig­ures included in the Wi-Fi Alliance white paper:

While the con­sumer is paci­fied with the promise of lower utility costs, it is the utility com­pany who will enforce the poli­cies set at the regional, national and global reg­u­la­tors. Thus, if a neigh­boring system has a shortage of elec­tricity, your ther­mo­stat might auto­mat­i­cally be turned down to com­pen­sate; if you have exceeded your monthly day­time quota of elec­tricity, energy-consuming tasks like washing and drying clothes, could be lim­ited to overnight hours.

Smart Grid and the utility’s con­trol extends beyond elec­tricity. Notice in Figure 1 above that there is a Wi-Fi linkage to gas and water meters as well!

Con­sumer Blowback?

Wall Street Journal reported “What Util­i­ties Have Learned From Smart-Meter Tests…” on Feb­ruary 22, 2010, and revealed sev­eral impor­tant early aspects of smart grid implementation.

• A prin­cipal goal is to enable util­i­ties to restruc­ture rate plans
• A prin­cipal goal is to force con­sumer behavior to change
• Some utility exec­u­tives antic­i­pate and fear a con­sumer rebellion

Nev­er­the­less, the big carrot for utility com­pa­nies to go along with the government’s Smart Grid is to bal­ance elec­trical demand, cut back on new power gen­er­a­tion facil­i­ties and enhance their profit picture.

Before the dust set­tles on Smart Grid, both con­sumers and util­i­ties may learn some sharp lessons about gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion: When the gov­ern­ment shows up on your doorstep and offers to help you save money, everyone knows that is an oxy­moron. Gov­ern­ment does not func­tion to help people or com­pa­nies to save money or to be more effi­cient; rather, it func­tions to main­tain and increase its own power and con­trol over its citizens.

Going Global

The UNEP report men­tioned above reveals that “15 per­cent of the fiscal stim­ulus funds com­mitted for 2009 – 2010, which exceed $3.1 tril­lion, can be regarded as green in nature… most green com­po­nents are ori­ented towards energy effi­ciency and renew­able ener­gies in a variety of sec­tors.“

A Busi­ness­Week article, “How Italy Beat the World to a Smarter Grid“  stated on November 16, 2009 that “After sev­eral false starts, 2010 finally could be the year when smart meters go global.”

Indeed, it is:

• Italy has already imple­mented Smart Grid tech­nology in 85 per­cent of its homes nationwide
• earth2tech.com reports that Smart Grid will gen­erate $200 bil­lion of global invest­ment in the next few years
• The Inter­na­tional Elec­trotech­nical Com­mis­sion (IEC) has laid out a global roadmap to insure inter­op­er­ability of Smart Grid sys­tems between nations
• Global com­pa­nies are rushing to gain their share of the global Smart Grid market: IBM, Siemens, GE, Cisco, Pana­sonic, Kyocera, Toshiba, Mit­subishi, etc.
• China is spending $7.32 bil­lion to build out Smart Grid in Asia

Other coun­tries with Smart Grid pilot projects already launched include Ger­many, France, Eng­land, Russia, Japan, India, Aus­tralia, South Africa and a host of others. Regional orga­ni­za­tions such as SMARTGRIDS Africa have been set up to pro­mote Smart Grid in smaller countries.

Thus, the global rush is on. In every case, Smart Grid is being accel­er­ated by gov­ern­ment stim­ulus spending. The global ven­dors are merely lining up their money buckets to be filled up with tax­payer funds.

As is the case in the U.S., there was little, if any, pre­ex­isting or latent demand for Smart Grid tech­nology. Demand has been arti­fi­cially cre­ated by the respec­tive gov­ern­ments of each country.

Con­clu­sion

Smart Grid meets 100 per­cent of the Technocracy’s orig­inal require­ments as described above. In other words, it will mon­itor and con­trol both delivery and con­sump­tion of energy and other green resources such as water and gas.

The Smart Grid ini­tia­tive was devel­oped and funded by gov­ern­ment agen­cies and NGO’s. It was the Energy Department’s Bon­neville Power Authority that invented the con­cept in the 1990′s. It was the Depart­ment of Energy’s Pacific North­west National Lab­o­ra­tory that invented the Grid Friendly Appli­ance Con­troller. It was the Fed­eral Admin­is­tra­tion that show­ered bil­lions of dol­lars over the pri­vate sector to jump-start the nation­wide ini­tia­tive to imple­ment Smart Grid in every community.

If the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment had not been the ini­tial and per­sis­tent driver, would Smart Grid exist at all? It is highly doubtful.

Fol­lowing the same pat­tern as the U.S., many other indus­tri­al­ized nations are imple­menting Smart Grid at the same time, using their own stim­ulus money. This syn­chro­nized imple­men­ta­tion is cer­tainly by design, and as such, it implies that there must be a designer. Who might be pro­viding such top-down coor­di­na­tion on a global basis must be saved for another paper. One thing is cer­tain: The tech­nology being pur­chased world-wide all orig­i­nated in the United States and is being mar­keted by the same global cor­po­ra­tions as men­tioned above.

Lastly, there is an assump­tion throughout Smart Grid lit­er­a­ture that the Fed­eral Admin­is­tra­tion will have full vis­i­bility of all data within the Smart Grid, even down to the indi­vidual house­hold. They will also be in a posi­tion to set national, regional and local dis­tri­b­u­tion and con­sump­tion poli­cies, such as your “fair share” of avail­able energy, gas and water.

Inter­na­tional stan­dards cre­ated for Smart Grid will also enable the U.S. Smart Grid to be con­nected seam­lessly with Canada and Mexico, thus pro­viding a com­pre­hen­sive North Amer­ican energy man­age­ment and dis­tri­b­u­tion system.

Is Smart Grid des­tined to be a global phe­nom­enon? Yes. Is it designed to sup­port a new global Tech­no­cratic, resource-based eco­nomic system? Yes.

Tech­noc­racy must be seen for what it is: An attempt to impose a total­i­tarian, sci­en­tific dic­ta­tor­ship. In 1933, it called for the inau­gu­ra­tion of Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt as dic­tator in order to “pave the way for eco­nomic rev­o­lu­tion.” For­tu­nately at the time, they failed in their attempted coup.

If today’s Smart Grid is suc­cess­fully com­pleted, it will enable the con­ver­sion of our existing eco­nomic system into some­thing far dif­ferent and far worse. This is why the Amer­ican people repu­di­ated Tech­noc­racy in 1933, and this is exactly why we (and cit­i­zens around the world) should thor­oughly repu­diate it today.

Resources

Scott & Hub­bert, Tech­noc­racy Study Course, Tech­noc­racy, Inc., 1934

Back­ground paper for the min­is­te­rial con­sul­ta­tions, Gov­erning Council of the United Nations Envi­ron­mental Pro­gramme, December 14, 2009

The Smart Grid: An Intro­duc­tion, U.S. Depart­ment of Energy

Pacific North­west National Lab­o­ra­tory, web site

2010 Strategic Plan, Office of Elec­tricity Delivery & Energy Reliability

The Net­worked Grid 100: Movers and Shakers of the Smart Grid

Meloan, Steve, “Toward a Global ‘Internet of Things‘”, Oracle Soft­ware, November 11, 2003

Wi-Fi for the Smart Grid, Wi-Fi Alliance, 2009

Obama Announces $3.4 Bil­lion Invest­ment to Spur Tran­si­tion to Smart Energy Grid, Depart­ment of Energy Press Release