Jon Smirl: Two Kinds of Consumers

I agree that there are two different problems.

The first class consumer wants charts of daily electricity usage. The utility network is not a high bandwidth back haul. There are a lot of security issues with allowing third party access to the meter via the utility net. It would be sufficient for the utility to offer daily usage data proxied onto an Internet server with login required. Maybe the utility company will print this into the bill or you would authorize a third party to access it.

A more sophisticated consumer wants real-time data. A need for real-time data implies that the consumer likely has an Internet connection. In this model the smart meter would be chirping out real-time data on radio. The consumer would buy a low cost device (home router?) to capture this information and push it onto the 3rd party (or your own PC) over the Internet connection. This will allow the integration of multiple consumer owned devices into the data stream - like smart appliances, monitoring devices, etc.

In all cases the consumer would own the meter data. But the utility would receive a mandatory license to use it for billing.

There's not a lot to be gained by analyzing your house to reduce a $20 bill. Daily usage graphs provide the information needed at low cost. On the other hand people with $1000 bills will spend a lot on monitoring devices and real-time data feeds. It's not cost effective to provide the same level of analysis capability to both classes of customers.