Yesterday in Maine, parties in Central Maine Power’s (CMP) regulatory proceeding met to negotiate a potential settlement that would allow individual customers to opt out of receiving a smart meter.

On the one hand, allowing opt out is bad policy. It implies that smart meter RF emissions are unsafe — flying in the face of extensive documented evidence to the contrary and creating unfounded and unnecessary concerns among other customers.

Moreover, opt-out hurts other customers, because non-communicating meters prevent CMP from achieving the full potential of several types of smart meter benefits. According to McKinsey, these areas — outage management, voltage optimization, line loss minimization, service crew efficiency, and more — comprise at least half of the benefits from smart meters.

Furthermore, opting out costs consumers more.

Note that people don’t get to opt out of other laws with which they disagree. For example, we all must wear seat belts, regardless of our belief in their safety.

On the other hand, why not allow customers to opt out?…

CMP says it could allow customers to receive a meter that would store detailed interval usage data in the meter, and that data could be collected manually every two months. Such meters would allow CMP to capture a portion of the benefits listed above, plus implement dynamic pricing to reduce peak demand, promote renewable resources, and enable cost-effective electric vehicle charging.

Such opt-out customers would pay $124 for the installation and $9.95 per month for the higher processing costs. Presumably they would have to pay for the installation of a standard smart meter upon moving out of their premise as well.

Experience with other utility programs, such as customer-funded programs in the past to receive interval usage data, strongly suggests that the number of opt-outs will be extremely small. When forced to put a price on unfounded fears about RF emissions, most customers will be reasonable — just as they are about most things. In fact, a Massachusetts utility offered opt-outs for its RF remote meter reading program a few years ago. Only 13 customers opted out.

Proponents of opt-outs say all they want is a choice. As long as they are willing to pay the full price, why not give it to them? After all, if we’re willing to pay the fines, we don’t have to wear our seat belts — not that I would recommend opting out of seat belts any more than I would recommend opting out of smart meters…