No more WordPress photo posts

I love using wordpress, but as I’m graduting college and applying to job positions, I decided to make the move. I am now officially at LaurenRigney.com

Peruse, enjoy, email me. Miss ya wordpress

~Lauren
LaurenRigney.com

Dream come true to be at Central Park

I know I’ve sadly left this blog alone a bit too long, but I did some good blogging for the non-profit group I interned at this summer, The Opportunity Agenda. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be uploading my favorite blog posts that I put together for the Agenda. And maybe I’ll add some of my New York pics!

Can’t believe I made it to NYC!

~Lauren

Chef Bob assisting with a strawberry custard tart

Amidst a sea of impressively white chef coats and matching caps, a single hat clearly stands out at an easy half foot taller than the rest. The man beneath the hat is furrowing his brow, his thin frame hunched over a wooden prep table to concentrate on his demo of a strawberry custard tart.

The sticky hot classroom he’s working in is chaotic and stridently loud, but a small group of students is patiently gathered round to jot notes and snap pictures of the dessert with their cell phones.

Occasionally, someone from the other side of the room shouts “Chef Bob! Chef Bob!” and interrupts the flow of his tart demo to ask if their own pie is ready to take out of the oven or if their meringue will be true to form. Barely raising one of his bushy eyebrows, 58-year-old Robert Wemischner responds to each question in a cool, collected voice just loud enough to be heard over the classroom chaos.

“His multi-tasking abilities are amazing,” student Charlene Patterson gushed. “He’ll be doing something and then somebody’s gonna say, ‘Chef Bob, I gotta tell you something,’ and he’ll say, ‘Yes, I’m listening,’ and he’s actually listening!”

Patterson is one of the 35 students in Wemischner’s first semester baking course at Los Angeles Trade-

Strawberry Custard Tart

Technical College, where he’s been teaching since 1991. Students can graduate with a certificate in professional baking in two years, and at a price of $20 per unit, they’ll spend less than $1,100 for their education. Contrast this to cross town rival, Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, where students are set back nearly $28,000 for a comparable diploma in patisserie and baking.

“It’s a different, much more privileged environment,” Wemischner says of Le Cordon Bleu. “Just because you’re paying a lot doesn’t mean you’re passionate, and just because you’re paying very little doesn’t mean you’re not.”

As an affordable community college in downtown Los Angeles, Wemischner’s classes at Trade-Tech attract an incredibly diverse array of students.

LATTC students work in their classroom

And their motives for studying professional baking are just as diverse as they are.

Some, such as Patterson, are fresh out of high school and want to study something fun and interesting. Others in the class have had more than a few jobs and are back in school to learn a new trade or pursue their near-abandoned dream of opening a bakery or catering company.

“I’ve had husbands and wives. I’ve had sisters and brothers. I’ve had had autistic, I’ve had blind,” Wemischner says of his students. “There’s no barriers at a public school. There are many cases reinventing themselves from previous life, which could be anything from being in jail, to addiction, to trouble with the law.”

Wemischner, who’s frequently described in the classroom as a role model, often forms strong friendships with his pupils. He currently corresponds with a former student who’s been in prison for the past five years. “He will be out this year and he promises in his letters he’s coming back to Chef Bob,” Wemischner says.

Despite the nearing of his twentieth anniversary at Trade-Tech, Wemischner’s own culinary path began far away from Los Angeles, and reads somewhat like a gastronomic novella.

Flan

To talk through his mazy past, he takes me to the Trade-Tech cafeteria and orders a plate of roasted Brussels sprouts for lunch. His chef coat stays on, but the tall hat is removed to show a crown of snow-colored hair.

Wemischner was born and raised in New Jersey. When his mother died at a young age, two aunts stepped in to care of him and his older sister, Marge. These are the same women that would later on help him open his first catering company.

According to Marge, Wemischner was a very curious child, but food was just one of his many interests. “He was very crafty. Arts and crafts were his thing, so the food business was an avenue to take,” Marge says.

Wemischner began experimenting in the kitchen as a young adult, but it wasn’t until he attended the University of Pennsylvania that his interest in food became a full-fledged passion.

As an Asian Studies major, he spent a lot of time with the university’s Japanese community, and together they’d often drink green tea. Not content with simply drinking tea as a casual pastime, he turned his interest into a personal pursuit. In 2000, nearly 40 years after graduating from Penn, Wemischner published a cookbook titled “Cooking With Tea,”

which has led him to many adventures, including visiting tea estates in India as an official guest of the Indian government.

Chef Bob teaching in the classroom

When he wasn’t studying or dining out with friends who appreciated quality cuisine as much as he did, Wemischner spent his time editing and writing for a student-run magazine called “34^th Street.” He was the magazine’s Associate Editor, and shamelessly used this position to meet up with some of the largest names in the food industry.

“I had a goal to apprentice myself to good chefs. I met a lot of very influential people in the food world who I had the guts to contact and say, ‘I want to interview you.’”

Among those he met were Gael Greene, who served as the New York Magazine restaurant critic for 30 years, and America’s first male food critic, Craig Claiborne, who wrote for The New York Times. Claiborne even invited Wemischner to his East Hampton home for a meal prepared by his personal chef.

Realizing at this point in life that he wanted to make a career out of his passion for food, Wemischner asked his new friends in the industry to reach out to their connections in France, where he hoped to apprentice.

While his classmates spent their summers working for minimum wage or soaking up the early seventies, Wemischner was in Lyon, laboring in the kitchens of France’s top chefs. He casually name drops Alain Chapel, former Michelin three-star restaurant owner, and Paul Bocuse, whose cooking earned him the French Legion of Honor, which is the highest decoration awarded by the French government to a citizen.

“It was peeling vegetables. In France there’s quite a hierarchy of training. You’re at the low bottom of the totem pole so you’re watching and you’re learning, and you’re observing. It was a very humbling experience, but a great educational one,” Wemischner says.

Fruit Tart

His apprenticeships also offered him a new appreciation and reverence for fresh food. The only problemwas, when he came home to the States at the end of each summer, he returned to a nation that was still stuck on canned foods and casseroles.

“We weren’t ready for what I had seen there,” Wemischner says. “I came back very excited about opening a specialty foods store, gourmet to go, catering, and then the first stumbling block was the ingredients aren’t available here. You could not get fresh basil!” He says emphatically, hands banging on the table.

Despite Americans’ overall disinterest in fresh food and gourmet cooking at this time, he was determined to open people’s minds and lead them to the light of his kitchen.

Immediately after graduating from Penn in 1972, a 20-year-old Wemischner opened a catering company in New Jersey with a little financial help from his aunts. Marge worked for Wemischner, helping where needed and learning from him about food.

“I think it was a very good thing. He was just starting to build his pyramid, and being young you can learn a

LATTC students working together on a recipe

lot from your experiences,” says Marge, who still makes many of Wemischner’s recipes from their catering days.

The brother-sister duo united again in 1975 to start another food business – this time in Beverly Hills, California. Wemischner says that after his time abroad, he was set on opening a “gourmet to go” shop based on the ones he saw in Europe. The idea was to offer busy professionals a place to pick up or stop by for a quick, but gourmet, fresh meal – much like the tens of cafes that now line streets like Rodeo Drive.

But back in 1976, when Le Grand Buffet officially opened its doors, customers were hesitant to taste Wemischner’s French specialties, such as duck pates and garden salads packed with fruits, nuts and other seasonal ingredients.

“You get a big surprise when there’s a lot of education needing to be done, because people were not ready for what I had in mind. This is what I saw everyday in France, but here that was such a rarity. You really had to sample it out, taste it out,” says Wemischner.

Le Grand Buffet marked its place in Beverly Hills, but the long hours and high stress did not lend itself to raising a family. He married Penn classmate Leslie in 1982, and after closing the shop in 1985, Wemischner later became father to a son and a daughter.

Marge says that because her brother is so family oriented, it seemed natural for him to take on a teaching

A student rolls out a pie crust

position. Trade-Tech first seemed like a good option because the flexible work week and eight month school year gave him more time at home.

Now that both his kids are away at college, Wemischner fills his free time writing and promoting his four books. “It’s a nice balance because the writing feeds the teaching, and the teaching feeds the writing. It’s a back and forth. What I write about I use in my teaching, and what I’m teaching leads me to questions that I need to answer in my writing.”

Back in the classroom, students are brimming with their own questions for Wemischner. With such an assorted student body in such an atypical classroom, patience is golden.

He stops by a group making whipped cream to point out that it’s granulated, not powdered sugar, that they should be using. And when one girl pulls a soupy custard out of the oven, he softly tells her that they’ll try again tomorrow, this time with more eggs.

“I’ve made this class my focus of these months because I know what a treasure he is. He’s a lemon, squeeze him,” student Susan Silverberg says.

Chef Bob assesses a student's glaze

Wemischner’s most recent book, “The Dessert Architect,” shows off his technical skills as a pastry chef. This isn’t a cookbook filling the shelves of soccer mom; it’s being used as a textbook in advanced baking classes across the country.

“He thinks outside of the box. He has a very, very, very complex mindset that makes him very talented in the field of baking and cooking,” Marge says.

Older sisters may like to brag, but Wemischner has proved that his wit carries outside of the kitchen. A trivia buff and puzzle fanatic, he’s been doing a daily crossword puzzle since junior high, and has competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Marge claims he can finish the New York Times puzzle in less than five minutes.

Wemischner says there’s a relevance to his two talents. “The kind of intelligence you need, the kind of detail-consciousness you need to do that [crosswords], is very related to pastry and dessert.”

While crosswords will most likely remain a hobby for Wemischner, his passion for food only seems to be growing. He has another book coming out next year and is frequently seen around Los Angeles speaking or stepping in as guest chef.

Robert Wemischner’s personal site, full of recipes and culinary events, can be found at www.robertwemischner.com

According to this site the bill would “ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies.” The eleven government funded agencies are those that have an extramural annual budget of more than $100 million

So what’s this mean? It means that if this bill passes, these big-budget agencies will have to regularly and timely produce their findings to the public at no charge.

Lots of new articles for journalists will arise if this is passed!

So sorry for the mini-break, but I’ll be coming back full swing!

~Lauren

Hill Street in Downtown L.A.

Herrera readily admitted he isn’t as politically conscious as he thinks he ought to be, but after sitting down with him and watching how his eyes gaze off into space every time I asked him a question, it’s clear that his hesitance is moreover due to his sincere concentration in devising an answer.

I probed him for thoughts on Obama’s anticipated speech, and in turn he tried to reason where his own, personal dilemmas fell in the scheme of what’s relevant to the nation.

“Maybe he [Obama] should increase tax credits for children?” he propositioned, only to follow it with another potential topic. “We need to find a different type of fuel to get away from oil; gas is so expensive.”

Like so many other curious Americans, the one topic Herrera said he most strongly wants Obama to address is healthcare reform. “I don’t know how, but it needs to be changed. It can’t wait. Just because we’re in a recession, people continue to work, it shouldn’t be an excuse,” he said.

Herrera’s held jobs that offer quality health insurance benefits for most of his adult life. Before his current position as a technician for Panasonic, he held another technician job at Technicolor. “My company provides 85 percent and that’s pretty good. I’ve never been in that bad of a situation.”

Still, Herrera said that when his wife, a full-time UPS employee, recently had some serious medical issues, finances were an issue. “My wife was paying for a private doctor and it was killing her,” he said.

I asked Herrera, a father of two kids aged 9 and 6, to imagine life if his company’s health benefits were taken away. Another moment of silence ensued. Then, a simple, “I’d be devastated if I can’t provide for them.”

Just how Herrera admitted he hasn’t had serious issues with health insurance, he also said he’s been lucky with maintaining jobs over the years. Although he was laid off from Technicolor when the company moved operations to Mexico, he had the good fortune of losing his job in early 2007, giving him enough time to find a new position before the financial collapse.

L.A. Superior Court

Possibly because of Herrera’s success in sustaining a steady middle-class income, the issue of unemployment did not make his list of top three issues for Obama’s speech. When asked if any family members or close friends lost their jobs because of the recession, there was another moment of contemplation, only to end with him laughing, “No. I have no friends.”

Instead, Herrera decided that even though he rents his house, Obama should bring more attention to home loans because so many people in California were affected by the mortgage crisis that began in 2007.

To round off his list of national priorities, Herrera chose alternative energy research. “I know in World War II they rushed out a whole lot of money for research. They should do that for alternative fuel. It’ll create a lot of jobs,” he said.

Being a USC student, it’s not uncommon to hear people complaining about a lack of things to do off campus. This may come as a surprise with Los Angeles being the second largest American city and all, but the truth is that USC’s odd location (just south of downtown and just north of the Inglewood hood) inadvertently isolates its students from the culture scenes that are prevailing on the west side of the city in areas like Westwood and Hollywood.

The one place USC is close to is Los Angeles’ downtown. As my classmate Nicole demonstrated, downtown can be a great place to get a good bargain, but when the sun goes down few people have any interest to stick around the rather grungy streets.

Photo by Lauren Rigney

Knowing all this, imagine my surprise when I found out that on one night each month downtown transforms into a pulsating art scene where hipsters can wander in and out of galleries and curious newbies such as myself can roam the streets taking in all the fantastic sights and smells that emerge when you let artists take over the streets.

What’s the Downtown L.A. Art Walk?

This lively (and free!) event is aptly named the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk and is where you’ll find me almost every second Thursday of the month. Although I only heard about the event a few months ago, the art walk itself was launched in 2004 by local artists and gallery owners who wanted to not only protect physical art scenes and galleries, but also preserve the historic downtown area as a communal place where people can come together and enjoy Los Angeles’ culture. In the past five years art walk has grown fast.

Photo by Lauren Rigney

The official site says that more than 10,000 people attend the monthly affair that takes place mostly on Spring and Main streets on the blocks between 9^th and 3^rd.

I have my personal reasons why I return to art walk each month (taco trucks, fresh air, meeting new people), but at November’s art walk I was on a mission to find out why all the thousands of other people come out every month to attend and support the open event.

So what’s so great about it?

Of all the people I spoke with, everyone agreed that what made this art scene so special was the fact that it takes place in downtown. Whether it be because of downtown’s atmosphere, people or physical location, it was unanimous that downtown L.A. is the perfect setting for this rising scene.

Rodolfo poses next to a picture of him__Photo by Lauren Rigney

Rodolfo Diaz Utra is a dancer from Cuba whose face happened to fill one particular gallery as a photographer did an entire series with Utra as her subject. “I feel here like it’s Havana because Havana is a place that is very artistic. It’s not a commercial thing, it’s very artistic – it’s from the heart,” Utra said.

Others agree with Utra that downtown successfully avoids the superficial feel that the rest of L.A. seems to carry with it. My friend Nili Schneidman, a fellow junior at USC, was the one who first told me about the art walk and never misses the event. “When you think about the media you think about Hollywood and glamour and glitz and superficiality and beaches and very shallow things. When you go there [Downtown Art Walk] for the first time it just kind of takes you by surprise and it’s really refreshing. You almost feel like you’re in New York or San Francisco.”

And speaking of New York and San Francisco, Schneidman also pointed out that unlike other major cities that are well-connected with public transportation, downtown is one of the few areas of L.A. that’s connected through decent transportation options, making it the ideal place to hold a big event for the public.

As great as the art walk is for the people and tourists of Los Angeles, the event is undoubtedly good for the city as well. What the Downtown Art Walk board members now refer to as “Gallery Row” used to be the Old Bank District and consists of abandoned banks and hotels. Part of the board’s mission is to “…craft long-term policies for economic stabilization, job creation and the promotion of positive public space…” and they are working to achieve this by supporting the numerous galleries that are  moving in.

Photo by Lauren Rigney

Jeremy Pollack, editor-in-chief of the Los Angles art and culture magazine “Forth” comes to Downtown Art Walk to spread the word about the magazine and meet others who share his interest in art. In regards to what role the art walk plays in the city, Pollack said, “It’s definitely good for downtown. There’s at least a scene here. It used to be just businesses and no one’s out and no one’s doing anything. It was kind of boring, but now it’s starting to happen again.”

For those who have yet to go to experience the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, I highly recommend it as something for anyone and everyone in L.A. to try out. Don’t feel like you have to be an art connoisseur to enjoy what it has to offer – I’m definitely not a pro in that field. But I think my friend Schneidman said it best, “If you can, make sure you catch it at least once because it’s one of those things you wouldn’t expect – it’s like a hidden gem of the city.”

Take me to the slideshow, please: Click Here

More info, please!

The Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk takes place every second Thursday of the month on Spring and Main streets. For an official map go to http://downtownartwalk.com/map or check out mine below. To just learn more about this cool event check out http://downtownartwalk.com/

More photos here

A map of some of the art walk’s featured galleries

View Larger Map        View This Poll

Photo by Kevin Blitz

G.I.V.E.-ing at MA’O Organic Farms by Lauren Rigney

Looking at how one local farm is giving Hawaii’s youth the opportunity to attend college and pursue their passions.

Photo by Kevin Blitz

Despite the constant reminders of the war American troops are fighting overseas in Iraq, many Americans are uninformed, if not unconcerned, with the war’s violent progress. A group of volunteers at Santa Monica Beach is working hard to reverse this by setting up a memorial every Sunday that offers visitors a frighteningly honest picture of the cost of war.

Local members of Veterans for Peace, a national organization of anti-war veterans, created Arlington West in February of 2004 to physically depict how many Americans troops have died to date. Each white cross carefully placed in the Santa Monica sand represents one American troop lost in the war. Back in 2005, volunteers were working with around 500 crosses. Now, nearly 4,400 soldiers have died, and volunteers are running out of beach space. To compensate, white crosses are painted red to represent not one, but 10 fallen troops.

Santa Monica City Council member Kevin McKeown has publicly supported Arlington West since its founding, but rejects the idea of it being a war protest. “Arlington West is not an anti-war demonstration – it’s an honor to the fallen.” Because Arlington West is a peaceful installation that requires no permit, McKeown said that the City Council has had little involvement with the project other than visits that members have personally chosen to make on their Sundays.

While McKeown sees Arlington West more as a memorial, Veterans for Peace purposely designed the installment to be nonbiased so each person can form his or her own interpretations about not only Arlington West, but the war itself. Even the volunteers carry their own understandings of what the expansive memorial represents.

“To me it’s an installation: a visual representation of the human cost of war,” said April Fitzsimmons, a volunteer who served in the Air Force Intelligence just before the U.S. began Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. “Where the newspaper reports the names, we are trying to show people the size and what it would look like if each of these crosses or crescents or stars of Davids were human beings. I don’t think it’s a protest because people are going to decide, regardless, what they feel about the war.”

The volunteer group has become more diverse over the years, and now there are high school students and curious beachgoers working alongside Vietnam and Korean War veterans to create the perfectly lined rows of white and red. To set up the memorial, which is carefully taken down at sunset, a handful of veterans arrive at 3 a.m. and lay down lines in the sand with hand-marked tape measures. The rest of the volunteers stumble in around 6:30, just before the sun rises.

Kathy Wasserman is one of the newer volunteers, and though she has no personal connection to any of the fallen troops, she said she made the easy decision to sacrifice her Sundays so she could educate others, particularly younger people, about the importance of peace.

“It’s education. We’re questioning that maybe there’s a better way of handling things when we don’t agree. I never questioned anything before, I’m 64. We just didn’t question government.”

However visitors of the memorial choose to view it, the memory that Arlington West leaves with people is undeniable. “They look down at the lines and it’s an impression on them,” said Vietnam veteran Michael Lindley.

McKeown agreed, “You can’t look at that field and not think about what it means to be at war. This is a visual reminder of what it means for this country to be at war.”

To promote Veteran for Peace’s overarching goal of keeping the public educated and informed, booths are set up with free pamphlets and DVDs. Perhaps more invaluable, though, are the veterans themselves who come from different battles but are all here to talk to the visitors, answer questions and just share a conversation.

Lindley shared, “When we tell people one red cross stands for ten white crosses, their jaw drops. They start a conversation with us. They want to know. They want information.”

Arlington West is on display at the north side of the Santa Monica Pier every Sunday from sunrise to sunset.      More info at www.arlingtonwestsantamonica.org

Take me to the Arlington West slideshow, please!

Residents wonder if smart grid is actually so smart
by Lauren Rigney

Imagine going to use your washing machine and reading a device on your wall that tells you the exact cost of electricity at that moment. After seeing the price you may decide to do your laundry then, but if the price is high you may decide to wait a couple hours when demand is lower and so are electric rates.

This type of alert message may become reality as Burbank Water and Power launches a pilot energy usage monitoring system next week that has many residents worried about costs, energy shortages and privacy issues.

The new smart grid program will be tested across nearly one-third of the city with hopes to drive down energy demand by keeping consumers well informed about their energy usage, and to help them avoid peak demand hours when energy costs are highest.

As plans for the $30 million “smart grid” move forward – Burbank City Council recently approved a request in April to apply for federal stimulus funding for the project – a common worry amongst residents is that the cost of the grid will be pushed onto rate payers.

Burbank's Skyline Photo by flickr.com/photos/edgarzuniga

David Piroli has lived in Burbank for more than 50 years and is worried that even if the city receives some stimulus money, it will still be up to residents to meet the $30 million price tag.

“If we need to do matching funds, where do the matching funds come from? Rate payers? The same rate payers that are struggling to pay their mortgage and everything else?” Piroli asked.

According to Fred Fletcher, assistant general manager of Burbank Water and Power, the smart grid is in line with the power plant’s other expenditures and projects, and will not have a  serious impact on residents’ energy bills regardless of whether or not Burbank is granted any stimulus money.

Another official of Burbank Water and Power, Fred Le Blanc, said that the smart grid will probably not lower energy bills, but it may actually prevent residents’ rates from increasing because it will reduce demand. As manager of the Energy Control Center, Le Blanc said that if Burbank’s energy demands continue to rise at its current rate of nearly 1.5 percent each year, the city will need to invest in new, expensive generating resources.

“If we can avoid that [investing in additional generating resources], we might able to hold our customers’ bills to about the same level they are today,” Le Blanc said.

The smart grid system not only allows Burbank Water and Power to monitor energy usage, but also to control how much energy is being directed to specific locales.

Some residents are concerned that if a power shortage does occur in Burbank or demand is very high, the power company will use the grid to redirect energy to the larger energy consumers, primarily the entertainment studios, and cause blackouts for the rest of the city.

Donald Elsmore lives in the Toluca Lake area and says that while he experiences very few blackouts, he fears how the smart grid will affect Burbank Water and Power’s reliability.

“In these desperate, hot days where it’s over 100 degrees, if they just have the ability to turn it [electricity] on and off at will once the system’s established, then we’re going to be very vulnerable.”

Piroli agreed that blackouts are a serious worry for residents, and said that he hopes to see the grid at least maintain Burbank’s current reliability rates.

Glenn Steiger, general manager of Glendale Water and Power and vice president of the Southern California Public Power Authority, says that by definition, smart grids actually reduce blackouts and allow power companies to fix such problems much faster.

Steiger said that because the smart grid allows the power plant to easily manage power supply, if a blackout occurs energy can be redirected from places where it is not being used and transferred to the areas that need it without interrupting anyone’s electric service.

“If your lights go out today, the only way we know that your lights are out is that you call us up. In the future, we’ll know before you know and all we’ll have to do is push a couple buttons and restore power to you almost immediately,” Steiger said.

But Le Blanc says that the beauty of the smart grid is not just how it will fix blackouts, but how it will work to prevent them.

The goal of the smart grid is to help people better understand their usage patterns and reduce citywide energy demand, but once developed, the grid can also be used to communicate with residents in the event that a power shortage does occur.

Le Blanc explained, “With a smart grid metering installed, we will be able to… let our customers know that we are having an electric system emergency where they can voluntarily help us out by turning off unnecessary appliances and reducing their use of lighting.”

While the smart grid is designed to be a helpful tool for the public, the question is raised that the grid is overly intrusive and may compromise residents’ privacy.

In a letter to the Burbank Leader newspaper, Elsmore described the smart grid program as “a clever way for Big Brother Government to become dictators in our everyday way of life.”

Burbank city council member and former mayor Dave Golonski has supported the smart grid in council meetings and said he disagrees that the grid is invading residents’ privacy.

Steiger also said that concerns about the grid being too invasive are uncalled for. “That intrusion actually works to everybody’s benefit because it gives all our customers real-time information on what it costs, what’s available, and it allows much more flexibility than we have today,” Steiger said.

Because smart grids utilize wireless networks similar to wireless internet, privacy issues become a serious concern for both consumers and those at the power company.

Former city council candidate Garen Yegparian says that he is always very cautious about privacy issues in the city and understands how residents may worry that their information could be exploited by outside hackers.

According to Fletcher, keeping the network secure and respecting consumers’ privacy are top priorities in the smart grid’s design. “We don’t have all the answers yet, but we have most of
them, and our system has the capability to implement the best security measures,” Fletcher said.

The pilot program will test 200 wireless meters on some of Burbank’s largest energy consumers, such as the entertainment studios, but Burbank Water and Power hopes to eventually also incorporate smaller businesses and homes in the pilot program to provide a variety of feedback.

While the wireless meters have yet to be installed, Warner Brothers representative Ashley Pierce said that the studio is supportive of anything that they can do to reduce their energy consumption and look forward to seeing how the grid works.

Burbank Water and Power hopes to connect the entire city with wireless meters by 2014, but may be able to do so sooner if they are granted the stimulus money in September. Though residents such as Elsmore would prefer the grid to be a voluntary program, supporters of the smart grid are confident that it will be a positive step for not only Burbank’s future, but also the future of the energy industry.

“Burbank is being somewhat of a trailblazer in this matter and I think the lessons learned from the Burbank implementation are going to be beneficial to utilities throughout the country,” Golonski said.

So the next time you wash your clothes, ask yourself if you wish that little device were there to let you know just how much that load will cost you. Soon enough, the day may come where you won’t do a single wash without first checking in on the smart grid.