Let me see if I’ve got this right. As discussed in a recent editorial, the “smart people” at Central Maine Power Co. are going to use $96 million in federal stimulus grant money along with some other money to install “smart meters” for their 600,000 customer homes (“Smart meter promises need to be kept,” Sept. 28).

If my math is right, that is a saving of up to $40 to $42 per household (a year?) or from $3 to $3.50 (a month?).

But the tragic story here is the loss of 141 CMP jobs.

The utility says it will try to place these people in other jobs in a market already riddled by thousands of jobless people.

And what percentage of CMP’s customers will pay attention to “time-of-day” usage, now made possible by the “smart meters?”

Let’s revisit this in three to five years to see whether the “smart people” at CMP really saved us some money and found those 141 jobs in this high unemployment market.

Not knowing the average salary of the 141 people being laid off, it is impossible to figure what amount in the millions of dollars the “smart people” at CMP are saving for themselves.

Did the administration in Washington and our own Public Utilities Commission really think that this was a good use of stimulus money?

 

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