The position of the NZ electricity industry appears to be that “smart” or “advanced” meters are safe.
The change from analogue (electro-mechanical) meters to microwave emitting “smart meters” has been led by “Arc Innovations”, a Christchurch based company which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Meridan Energy. The company’s website is
http://www.arcinnovations.com/
Arc Innovations commissioned Dr Bill Heffernan, Senior Research Engineer with the Electric Power Engineering Centre (EPECentre) to do research on health effects of “smart meters”. The EPECentre is located at the University of Canterbury.* Its website is http://www.epecentre.ac.nz/. You can see from its “People” page that although it is university based it acknowledges “Industry partners”, so its independence may be questionable. Its industry partners include Meridian, Mighty River Power, Transpower and other electricity generating/transmitting companies. http://www.epecentre.ac.nz/membership/partners.html
(You can see a screenshot of the industry partners, taken in 2013, below.)
Dr Bill Heffernan’s research project was overseen by Dr Allan Miller, Director of the EPECentre. A media release about his work, which, perhaps predictably found no health problems associated with “smart meters” may be found at this link http://www.epecentre.ac.nz/#
* Interestingly, the University of Canterbury also has a Wireless Research Centre at http://www.wrc.canterbury.ac.nz/, the home page of the site, as accessed October 28, 2012 states: “The Wireless Research Centre (WRC) of the College of Engineering, is a key research theme within NZ, focusing on wireless communications. We join together leading academic researchers from around the world, technology and communication based companies, students and Government to undertake ground breaking research in the field of wireless communication.”
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