Automated Metering Eliminates Local Jobs

A couple of technicians from TruCheck Metering showed up today to install a radio transmitter on my gas meter, and I couldn’t help thinking about Michael Shuman and his work with local economic multipliers – those rankings that show whether an expenditure benefits a community by keeping money local, or hurts it by extracting money from the community.

Local Energy hired economist Shuman back in 2004 to estimate the impact on the local economy of heating fuel purchases in Santa Fe County. At that time, Shuman estimated that more than 85-cents of every dollar Santa Feans were paying on their natural gas bills was leaving Santa Fe. You could almost hear Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound.”

The other 15-cents – the part that was staying in town – was going in large part to the meter readers. Now, I don’t relish the inefficiency of trucks driving around Santa Fe carrying  technicians from house to house to jot down meter readings, but at least it was providing a few local jobs. According to a July article in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the New Mexico Gas Company is hoping that automating the meters will enable them to replace 75 meter readers with five data collectors in the region stretching from Santa Fe to Belen. The sucking sound just gets louder.

The antidote, of course, is relocalization. Local Energy’s biomass district energy study, released in 2006, showed that downtown Santa Fe could easily be heated using local fuels, and that doing so would create enormous economic benefits. In addition to stimulating our local economy by keeping more heating dollars recirculating locally, installing a city-wide heating system that utilizes local fuels would create jobs, radically cut the city’s carbon emissions, and pay for much needed restoration of the forests surrounding Santa Fe.

Furthermore, if the city ever wakes up and realizes it needs to create a municipal electric utility, having a district heating system would enable huge efficiency gains because the waste heat from electrical generators, as well as from other sources, could be used to heat the city.

With such clear benefits available, why isn’t Santa Fe switching from dirty, carbon-based energy systems that suck money out of the community to clean one’s that don’t?

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