Hear, hear! Be very skeptical when an industry wants to go from dumb to "smart." They want you to remain captive. They want to resist margin pressure as they get ridiculously past merely "mature." They want to resist becoming the transitional backup system for a "smart edge." Newly built grids, and peak capacity will be lighter, cheaper, and local. These trends will be spotted in developing nations first, where the grid providers are unable to keep up with new demand, but they will hit mature grids, too, because they will cost less.
Lots of utilities have adopted smart meters, Ontario and British Columbia certainly have. I don't know as much about the states.
1: http://www.nyiso.com/public/markets_operations/market_data/p...