These are the Crazy Years.

I mean, I was thinking that earlier anyway, when I had to drive downtown and was listening to Rush go on about this bill in California that purports to give same-sex couples insurance coverage for infertility treatments. But that is, as they say, another story.

No, I’ve been seeing ads on blogs lately like this one:

Now, come on.  “Free Energy”, the great bugaboo of Evil Global Corporations, like the ones that stole the guy’s invention for making your internal combustion engine run on dihydrogen monoxide.  Yeah.

But I was looking at that thing and thinking to myself, “That’s a wireless/wired Ethernet module of some sort.  How is that going to make energy at all, let alone ‘free’ energy?”

So I googled “OPTO 22”.  (See the label on the bottom.)  And it turns out that the picture is of an “Energy monitoring unit with Demand Response capability”.  Which makes a certain amount of sense; it’s going to monitor your energy use and talk to other modules elsewhere in your system that could be shut down at times of high demand.  But there are two problems with this wonder of the modern age.

1) This is an industrial — not residential — control that costs over a grand, MSRP.  And it doesn’t operate in a vacuum; you’d need other expensive modules to control your home appliances, e.g., your air conditioner, your refrigerator, your freezer, ceiling fans, lights, etc.

2) Your local electric utility probably has a program to install something like this that turns your air conditioner off during the day during periods of peak load…and they’ll install it for free.*

So I deduce two things from this, and adduce something we already know.

A) Someone** is trying to sell you something you don’t need, that won’t actually do what they claim, to wit, “produce free energy for your home”; and

B) Power utilities, far from being scared of such things, actually LOVE them because they reduce peak load, which is a major problem particularly in the summer when everyone is running air conditioning.

C) Caveat emptor — because TANSTAAFL.

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* Mine does, and they bug the hell out of me all the time to let them do so.

** Likely not the controller manufacturer themselves, who appear to be more interested in selling to industry than to Joe Blow in the little bungalow down the street.  Someone is probably reselling this stuff and making a killing off of little old retiree types in Florida.  Admittedly I did not click on the ad, even though it was on a certain well-known Filipina journalist’s blog site and the link from there is probably mostly harmless.  Oh, hell, whatever — I did click on it, and it goes to some outfit called “Power4Patriots”.  Geez.  Why not just try to sell me gold for my retirement portfolio and be done with it?  I think the gold guys are more honest.