Turning on and off quickly is “abuse” now?
What if the electric operator’s software malfunctions and causes rapid power cycles to customers’ meters?
The end result would be the same, and it certainly wouldn’t be considered “abuse” then.
What if the electric operator’s software malfunctions and causes rapid power cycles to customers’ meters?
The end result would be the same, and it certainly wouldn’t be considered “abuse” then.
I explicitly used the fact that a bug could cause this to trigger at the scale of an entire electric company to show how bad this could be.
> What if the electric operator’s software malfunctions and causes rapid power cycles to customers’ meters?
> The end result would be the same, and it certainly wouldn’t be considered “abuse” then.
Yes because it's not built to be activated in that manner. Especially for high power/high voltage. This is not a mechanical keyboard switch.
> What if the electric operator’s software malfunctions and causes rapid power cycles to customers’ meters?
Then this is on the power company to fix it and fix the downstream failures this might cause. (Same as power outages that cause damages)
> it certainly wouldn’t be considered “abuse” then.
Abuse: Misuse; improper use; perversion.
And sure, they’ll have to fix it, but it’s still a glaring issue that should have never happened in the first place. A smart meter should very much be tolerant to this form of “abuse”.
As other commenters have said, controls for such a thing should most certainly have been put in place by the smart meter manufacturer. This isn’t something they couldn’t possibly protect against like your sledgehammer example. This is fully within their control, they just chose not to protect against it.
Those very well could be catastrophic failures, but that doesn’t in any way shape or form change this also being one.
My argument is that ’software error at the power company’ can easily cause catastrophic failures at the meter, which it stands no chance of being able to prevent. So why should it specifically be built to defend itself against the remote possibility that the master control program sends it too many on/off switch commands too quickly?
Why should it specifically be built that way? Because it's bad for devices to self-destruct with no attempt at mitigation whatsoever.
As the other commenter stated, that does not in any way imply "robust against all possible issues coming upstream" and it would be ridiculous to expect that.
Which scenarios you engineer the system to tolerate with what level of survivability and serviceability is going to be a matter of engineering to budget, right?
If a standing desk and shredder can handle that, then a smart meter should very much also be able to.
None of this was your original point, anyway. You instead chose to focus on a completely different and irrelevant failure case.
There is a world of difference between "voltage regulation issues might cause major problems" (your point) and "turning the thing on and off too quickly causes the whole thing to self-destruct" (the actual point).