Take Back Your Power | Full Documentary

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The Take Back Your Power documentary is an investigative film directed by Josh del Sol that examines the global rollout of so called smart meters and the wider smart grid program behind them. It was initially released on September 5, 2013, and was later updated, including a 2014 version carrying additional content and subtitles. The film’s subject is a piece of infrastructure almost nobody chose and most people barely noticed, a small device bolted to the side of the house that quietly replaced a mechanical dial with a networked computer reporting on the inside of a home.

What the film is actually investigating

The framing here matters. Utilities presented the meter swap as a technical upgrade, a matter of efficiency and modernization that required no particular conversation with the customer. Del Sol’s film treats it instead as a policy decision with consequences that were never put to the people affected by it. The investigation builds through interviews with technical experts, with officials responsible for the rollout, and with individuals who say they were harmed by it, and it keeps returning to a single question. Who authorized this, and on what evidence.

That question turns out to be harder to answer than expected, which is much of the point. The film traces a program that moved with remarkable speed across many jurisdictions, funded and encouraged from above, arriving at the household level as a fait accompli. Customers who asked for details frequently found that the people installing the devices could not explain them, and customers who declined often discovered that declining was not a straightforward option.

The privacy argument at the core of the Take Back Your Power documentary

The strongest section of the film is the one on data. A traditional meter recorded how much electricity a house consumed over a billing period. A smart meter records consumption at short intervals and transmits that record continuously, and the difference between those two things is enormous. Fine grained load data does not just show how much power was used. It shows patterns, and patterns describe behavior. When a household wakes, when it sleeps, when it is empty, when appliances run, when routines change.

The film argues that this constitutes surveillance of the interior of the home regardless of intent, that it was collected without meaningful consent, and that the legal protections which normally govern what happens inside a residence were not applied because the data was classified as utility billing information rather than as a record of private life. It examines who holds that data, how long it is retained and who may request access to it. This is the portion of the argument that has aged most interestingly, since the questions it raised about behavioral data harvested from household devices became central to a much larger debate in the years that followed.

Health, billing, fire risk and security

Beyond privacy, the film raises four further concerns and treats them as related symptoms of the same rushed deployment. It presents testimony from people who report health effects they attribute to the radiofrequency emissions of the devices, an area where the mainstream scientific position holds that exposures from smart meters fall well below established safety limits and that a causal link has not been demonstrated. That counterposition belongs in view while watching, and the film’s own contribution here is less the science than the account of how complaints were handled when people brought them.

It also documents billing disputes in which customers reported large and unexplained increases after installation, cases involving equipment failures and fires attributed to the new units, and the cybersecurity implications of attaching millions of remotely accessible devices to the electrical grid. The last of these is the concern that has drawn the most serious attention from outside the film’s own audience, since a networked device capable of remote disconnection is by definition a device capable of being switched off by somebody who is not the utility.

Consent, refusal and the larger pattern

What holds the film together is not any single technical claim but the structure it keeps exposing. A technology is deployed at scale, the decision is made somewhere the affected parties cannot reach, the benefits are asserted broadly and the costs are borne individually, and the people who object are handled rather than answered. The film positions itself as part of a broader movement arguing for transparency and consumer rights in the energy sector, and its practical thread follows people who attempted to refuse installation and documents what happened to them.

Those accounts are the most concrete material in the film. They show opt out programs that carried fees, they show the limits of what a customer can actually decline when the alternative is disconnection, and they show local officials attempting to legislate on a subject they had not been given adequate information about. The Take Back Your Power documentary makes the case that consent which cannot be withheld without penalty is not consent in any meaningful sense.

Why it still matters

More than a decade after release, the specific fight over meters has largely been settled by installation, but the template the film identified has been applied repeatedly since to devices with far greater reach. Watching it now is less an argument about electricity than a case study in how infrastructure decisions get made, how objections are processed, and how quickly a default becomes permanent once the hardware is on the wall. The film was featured in the January 2026 Monthly Report and sits with the other investigations gathered in the MUST WATCH Documentary Library.