TL;DR: It’s 2026 and even the normies are having grown-up conversations about surveillance capitalism; where’s your written Privacy Policy? Perhaps you should lead with that. Or proactively derail the worst-assumption train by acknowledging this is indeed the precursor step to dynamic pricing, and giving ratepayers a heads-up on what that will (and more importantly, won’t) look like.
So, National Grid and other electric utilities (Eversource, Unitil) are rolling out Smart Meters across New England. Hard.
Ah-hem. The topic of smart meters seems to weirdly draw literal tinfoil-hat cranks of the ‘wifi allergy’ type, so let’s get it out of the way: No, the meters don’t emit ionizing radiation or harmful levels of RF that are going to cook your brains, destroy your sperm count, inject 5G Covid chips into the water supply or whatever1. I love a good conspiracy theory, but anything you read from here on that overlaps with known ones is from a “knows how the sausage is made” perspective and at least minimally evidence-based.
That said, it is probably axiomatic at this point that the harder a corporation is pushing, wheedling and cajoling you to agree to something, the less in your interest it is. Based purely on the Smart Meter rollout experience so far, these things probably capture your firstborn and sell it to Satanists Mark Zuckerberg or something. OK, probably not, in reality (we’ll get to that), but this speaks to the bungling of the rollout and the accompanying messaging (or lack thereof).
Knock knock, we’re from the utility and we’re here to help you
My personal experience with the rollout was a fellow wearing what looked like a Halloween-costume yellow safety vest knocking at the door, claiming he was here to cut power and update our meter. Interacting in realtime with live strangers, I love that so much. Upshots of this were:
- Installer (3rd party subcontractor) insists they’ve “sent literature” earlier in the month (we didn’t receive).
- Installer determined the meter replacement we got last March (after some rather informationless Smart Meter flyers did circulate) wasn’t it, and he needs to drop our power now.
- When asked for basics like written privacy notice, data collection disclosure or any details relating to same, or advanced notice of when the power interruption will be, installer makes abundantly clear that he doesn’t know anything beyond how to physically remove and insert the units.
- Installer insists we can call the number on a doorknob hang-tag they’ve just provided to “schedule a consultation”, and agreed to hold off replacing the meter until this occurred. Calling this number eventually leads you to another everyday phone-pen employee who cannot answer questions of a legal or technical sort, and culminates in them raising a ticket with a promise for someone to call back (or email, at their preference).
- Two days later, the power went out. No heads-up, howdy-doo or knock at the door. As it comes back on, out a basement window I see a pair of legs walking away from the meter side of the house. No call/email; I’m still no closer to learning how it’s going to get those Covid chips over to the cold water pipe (just kidding).
- There is the option to ‘opt out’ of smart meters, This carries a one-time fee of $33 plus a surcharge of $26 per month (2026), putatively to cover the cost of continuing to read them the old-fashioned way (typically by driving a truck down your street with a wireless reader).
Now, I mentioned a flyer, received close to a year ago, which thanks to my lax document disposal processes excellent document-retention processes I still had sitting on my desk. The usual four-color-glossies on drool-proof paper, it does cover some things relating to the foil-hat crowd about reliability2 and RF safety, but update rate, data collection and processing details, and any mention of remote-disconnect features are notably absent.
Who Cares? (Your wallet, as usual)
The cost of electricity is a bit of a, erm, hot topic these days.
The main practical difference between Smart Meters (in utility parlance, Automatic Metering Infrastructure, or AMI) and the unsmart variety is the meter-reading interval: while typical unsmart (‘non-communicating’) meters are read monthly to produce a monthly bill, the smart type generate much more fine-grained usage data, on the order of seconds or minutes. The obvious driver for this, as far as the average ratepayer is concerned, is dynamic pricing: instead of paying a fixed price per KWh, the cost of electricity can vary throughout the day, costing more during peak demand periods and less at other times. This is not a conspiracy theory (it’s discussed at-length, albeit inscrutably, in the utilities’ public filings with the state DPU3), and is not necessarily a bad thing, as both the actual cost and environmental impact of electricity from the generating side do vary with demand, and a simple peak/offpeak model could even save the average consumer some bucks if they can shift their usage around a bit, without making a day-job of it.
Variable pricing is coming (from the same public filings, target of 2027); the literal million-dollar question is, what shape will it take? Will it be a simple and stable peak/offpeak (“day/night”) rate structure? A more comprehensive, but stable, Time-Of-Use profile? Or will it swing wildly between successive days on 15-minute increments as extremely hot/cold days crop up or cloud cover shifts over our state’s substantial solar deployments? If we indeed need to worry about surge pricing, what kind of guardrails will it include to prevent a wild string of $300 KWhs while you’re at work? Will ratepayers have to sit up watching spot prices with a nervous hand on the mains breaker4? How will it affect net metering? Can customers ‘opt out’ of alternate rate plans independently of AMI?
Realistically, it will “probably” end up being some less eyebrow-raising flavor of Time-Of-Use pricing without the price-gouging surprises (we live in one of the dwindling states with consumer protection agencies actually doing their jobs), but it would be nice to hear what’s on/off the table from the utility directly.
Airing of Grievances
Besides the surge pricing question, there are some other legitimate concerns folks tend to raise about AMI, that NGrid’s communication avoids or glosses over. I can’t claim where it sits on the spectrum between ulterior motives vs. keeping the normies calm, but it’s a bad look. Off the top of my head:
- Privacy and Granular Data Collection: As mentioned, AMI samples power consumption much more frequently than needed for billing (even assuming a simple peak/offpeak ToU model). Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing (giving the customer access to fine-grained usage will let them see which activities and appliances guzzle the most juice), but it does raise potential privacy concerns. Besides the usual sellable data like home occupancy and appliance fingerprinting, depending on just how granular the data is, one can do even more wild things with this, including fingerprint what TV shows people are watching (ACR, Automatic Content Recognition). In a 2026 world where even the normies are starting to have serious conversations about surveillance capitalism, and repressive governments buy similar data on the open market to openly use against their own citizens, perhaps you don’t want anyone with a buck to spend to know which end(s) of the political spectrum you’re consuming your news from. In NGrid’s case, they were not able to provide a written privacy policy covering smart meter usage data even when prompted directly (their website has one, but it appears to mainly cover the website itself and related smartphone apps, not automatically-generated usage data), let alone any details about collection granularity, data processing and retention periods, device fingerprinting, use for AI training, etc.5 From the aforementioned public filings, measurement intervals on the order of 15 minutes on the customer end and 5 minutes on the load settlement (paying the generating suppliers) backend are mentioned, which is probably not enough for ACR in any form, but the reporting interval is remotely software-configurable. Realistically, NGrid is probably not going to process and monetize usage data in creepy ways, even if only due to how infrastructurally ill-prepared they are to do so due to not being in that business, but again, it would be great if they’d just come out and say so in a legally-binding way.
- Remote Kill Switch…and Hackers!: It’s a bit soft-pedaled, but as is commonplace with AMI, the smart meters being rolled out by National Grid include pushbutton remote-disconnection capability (the mailing doesn’t mention this at all). Now, even with working consumer protections and a legal procedure for utilities to follow when terminating a customer behind on payments, whoopsies can and do happen. In a place that gets Wicked Cold(tm) in winter, whose household heating almost invariably requires wall power to operate (including pellet stoves and oil burners, which are still popular here), I’d still feel better if disconnecting someone required rolling a truck and physically pulling wires or meters, if only so the inconvenience of it would encourage non-automated sanity-checks (e.g. human eyes double-checking it’s the right address) and slow things down enough to prevent life-endangering whoopsies at scale.
…Of course, as with any massively networked automation, the possibility arises of someone other than the utility (i.e. h4x0rz, terrorists, opposing nations-at-war, political extremist parties or Bad Actors by any other name) using exploits to throw those switches at scale to make a point. Depending who you ask, this scenario ranges from foil-hat rubbish to near-inevitability. Unfortunately, supply-chain and infrastructure focused attacks are becoming increasingly commonplace, and concentrations of power attract those who seek it: even for systems designed to be secure, there is an absolutely vast amount of money in finding ways into secure systems, and the CVE databases are absolutely littered with the gamut ranging from incredibly clever side-channel attacks to dumb mistakes by system designers who thought they knew better. The explosion of frontier exploit-discovery automation tools powerful enough to scare the bejeezus out of world governments won’t help with this, either. Yes, the protocols used by AMI are designed to be encrypted and secure, but still by fallible humans (and/or their tools) on a finite budget and aggressive timeline. - Adversarial Load Shedding: With 2-way signaling capabilities related to the aforementioned remote-disconnect, involuntary load-shedding during peak demand enters the discussion. Peak demand is often another term for the hottest and coldest days of the year, where functioning A/C or heat start to become safety-of-life concerns. It’s a valid concern that the ease of load-shaping will make it a convenient lever for utilities to pull in place of expensive infrastructure and capacity improvements.
- Inconvenience Fees: As mentioned, ‘opting out’ of AMI carries a not-insignificant monthly surcharge, ostensibly to cover the cost of manual meter reading. (“But don’t worry, AMI customers’ bills will drop the same amount since they’re not incurring that expense”…said no utility ever.) Without getting into deep technical weeds, the smart meters being rolled out in New England use short-range mesh networking, and rely on basestations at roughly the city block level to collect and forward data on to the utility. Note, while National Grid refers to them as ‘non-communicating’ meters, the existing ones already report wirelessly on-demand and have a similar RF range, so reading them via truck roll vs. fixed basestations seems a little academic, and makes the surcharge appear mostly punitive. At least ‘opting out’ is a technical (if painful) option here; In other locales, utilities are just pulling the plug on customers who refuse smart meters.
Is the sky falling?
Probably not, although neither is your bill anytime soon. Still, for an industry that already faces an uphill climb toward AMI adoption, NGrid don’t seem to be doing themselves any favors in rollout and messaging.
- It’s an FCC-certified device and the regulatory authorities have actually thought of this; though ham and LoRa radio users are going to have some things to say about it ‘sharing’ space on 900MHz. And yes, most of the non-smart meters also communicate over RF, and at similar power levels (just less often). ↩︎
- Apparently, another common foil-hat theory is that ‘smart’ meters, specifically and exclusively, are rigged to systematically over-report electric usage (this would be easy for a Public Utilities Commission or even a technically adept whistleblower to detect, demonstrate at scale and get the utility extremely spanked). Still another crank bone of contention is that they do measure accurately, which is a Problem when the old mechanical ones are superstitiously believed to be ‘slow’ due to aged bearings and lubricant, and easier to tamper with. ↩︎
- Although most of these seem to be spent poormouthing the state to foot the bill for their own industry’s infrastructure and software updates on the backend to make it happen, amid the who-me dance between the generation and distribution sides. ↩︎
- Or more likely, need to hire yet-another cloud subscription company with a cutesy name that goes bust in two years to handle this for them. ↩︎
- One of those “never thought I would have to say this” moments until we got a flyer from the city last year about a smart water meter rollout which promised to use AI to count your flushes and “may” “occasionally” “share” with “carefully-selected” “partners”. Specifically, it touted reporting at up to “1 minute time intervals to allow analytics never before conceivable. New breakthroughs with machine learning algorithms interpret the incoming data for the user down to a level of dissecting household water usage by fixture.” The contractor responsible for the mailings later backpedaled, saying that they were intended for a neighboring town, before installing conventional monthly-read (RF) water meters. ↩︎
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