Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but there is heavy resistance.

My mother won't install a heat pump because she claims she doesn't want to be dependent on electricity. She likes the idea that if it goes down, she can still heat her home.

It is irrational because her gas burner needs electricity to run anyway, and if electricity shuts down, she lights a wood fire, which she could have as an alternative to the heat pump.

Humans have religion-like behavior in every aspect of their life, not just God-related things.

If you haven't heard about the French pushback against the linky, a smart electricity meter, google it. You will have a good overview of what can go wrong if we force the issue on people.

View on HN

Gas burners use little enough electricity that you can get an UPS for them though.

Indeed. Hence the religious aspect.

She doesn't care about making sense.

She cares about her stance on electricity heating.

The point is you can plug it into an UPS and get 12 hours of heating without electricity working...

We get a lot of power cuts. I have a UPS on the pump for my kerosene fired heating. We also have an aga which uses no power, just kerosene.

I’m putting in underfloor heating powered with an air source heat pump, but leaving the boiler and radiators in place for midwinter and power cuts.

You see, that's the rational approach: you got a problem, you find a solution.

Most people don't do that.

"I heard that..."

"I believe that..."

Is mostly the source of their decision making.

Forcing heat pump on people will make them react like you are stealing from them.

Because you are: you are stealing their ability to choose.

But they choose badly.

Resistance againt Linky was legit, and avoided important breaches to privacy.

As a nerd, I get you think it was the main problem.

But most people didn't care about that.

The main contenders were:

- Linky calculates my electricity bill badly. It was in fact more accurate, but sometimes it meant a raise in bill.

- Linky emits dangerous radiation or magnetism. That was, of course, a total hoax.

- Linky didn't allow me to cheat on my bill anymore (lots of people around me were hacking their meter to pay less).

- Linky is forced on us by Big Electricity. So it's bad.

The privacy thing is legit, but all those people had full facebook accounts, most of them had full sync on their smartphone, use chrome without an adblock, and so on.

Only geeks like us really care about the privacy aspect.

On the other hand, it's a greener solution:

- Less people in cars to check meters.

- Live load balancing on the power grid.

- Clear consumption stats so that you can optimize your own bill.

So the linky, which eventually got into most homes, is deployed with success.

But it took so many years because of the pushback.

Eventually, if the pushback would have been just about the privacy, we could have focused on fixing that and would have had a cheaper, faster deployment, with privacy.

We had the worst: expensive, long deployment, and the privacy invasion is still in place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com