How is it that so many intelligent, inside-the-beltway environmentalists are buying into an eco-health-safety-finance debacle with the potential to increase energy consumption, endanger the environment, harm public health, diminish privacy, make the national utility grid more insecure, cause job losses, and make energy markets more speculative?

Answer: by not doing their homework.

Welcome to the Smart Grid – a government-funded money machine capable of intruding into every aspect of our lives. Smart Grid technologies – initially funded to the tune of $3.4 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and slated to cost $11 billion through 2011 – are enough to make even diehard liberals demand a claw back of misspent tax dollars.

On the surface, Smart Grids sound  ‘green’ – with promises of saving energy, creating new power-line corridors run on wind and solar, way-stations to power-up electric vehicles, energy-efficient upgrades to an aging power infrastructure, and real-time customer knowledge of electricity use.

And there’s the enticing communications factor: a nationwide high-speed broadband information technology barreling down high-tension electric corridors called Broadband-Over-Power-Lines (BPL). What could be more perfect for communicating facts about the planet, funding enviro-candidates, pushing legislation, and organizing Earth Days?

But few who actually study how these new systems functionwant anything to do with them. Other than those who stand to make enormous profits and the physicists or engineers who dream up such stuff, Smart Grids are giving knowledgeable people the willies.

What Is a Smart Grid?

These days the word “smart” is attached to anything even marginally digital — and indeed it’s an effective marketing tool because who wants anything dumb?

But is the Smart Grid really smart?

The problem: smart metering will turn every single appliance into the equivalent of a transmitting cell phone, and this at a time when public concern about the safety of exposure to the radiofrequency radiation (RF) of wireless technologies is on the rise. Heads up: that’s every dishwasher, microwave oven, stove, washing machine, clothes dryer, air conditioner, furnace, refrigerator, freezer, coffee maker, TV, computer, printer, and fax machine.

The average U.S. home has over 15 such appliances, each of which would be equipped with a transmitting antenna. While older models can be retrofitted, General Electric (GE) and other appliance manufacturers are already putting transmitters into their latest designs, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is already giving out tax credits.

Meanwhile, people who don’t want to use such appliances won’t be able to deactivate the wireless component without disabling it and voiding warranties. Citing “electricity theft,” it could also be illegal to do so.

Yet, not one safety concern regarding the cumulative effects of 24/7 exposure to RF radiation seems to have occurred to the backers of Smart Grids. And this is despite the fact that all appliances will transmit wireless data with peak power bursts far above current safety standards – at frequencies between 917 MHz and 3.65 GHz in the ultra-high frequency/microwave ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, several times a minute.

And that’s just the indoor part. All transmitters inside your home or office will communicate with a Smart Meter attached to the outside of each building. (1) That meter, in turn, will transmit at an even higher frequency to a central hub installed in local neighborhoods. In what are called “mesh networks,” signals can also be bounced from house-meter to house-meter before reaching the final hub. So exposures will not just be from your own meter, but accumulating from possibly 100-to-500 of your neighbors’ as well.

That’s a hefty barrage of radiation.

Some gas, water, and electric utilities are now using such smart networks, each with its own metering system and separate exposures – creating a multi-frequency wall of radiation that, in the history of living creatures, is unheard of.

In addition, the meters and the antennas will act as transceivers, allowing both you via mobile phone or computer – and take note: your utility company – to remotely control your appliances.  According to Jenny Anderson and Julie Creswell writing in the New York Times, one such system in the Midwest already allows the utility to cycle furnaces and air conditioners on and off every 15 minutes, with the stated purpose to reduce peak-loads on electric grids.

On closer scrutiny, Smart Grids look like another Build-It-Now-Deal-With-The-Consequences-Later fiasco. At a time when health concerns about the safety of cell phones, antennas, and Wi-Fi hotspots are mounting around the globe, Smart Grids will require literally billions of new transmitters, each pumping “electrosmog” into the environment – for which there will be no mitigation, no conscientious objection, and no escape.