I see some serious lawsuits over this if they kill power and someone dies due to heat stroke, freezing to death, or because some life-sustaining medical equipment loses power. Here in the U.S. where I live, the power company for years has been trying to get me to volunteer to swap out my power meter for one they can control. They "claim" it is so they can "temporarily" cut power to my house during peak-power consumption times (like very hot summer days when AC units are running hard) to reduce demands on the grid. After reading about this shady (evil?) tactic, I see a ulterior motive. While I have never been late or missed a payment, I am glad I never switched, and now, never will. I accept there probably are some who could easily pay their utility bills, but don't for whatever reasons. Those are the customers they need to be going after, not those on hard times, already struggling to survive.
Smart meters. Auto bill pay. Putting your data in someone else's cloud. The outcome of all of this will be what you would expect it to be. When we got the electric smart meter we were informed that we take it or pay $50 per month fee for someone to come out and read the old one.
Wow! That is definitely a rip-off, and IMO, coercion. In my area, the power company came out and changed all our meters to meters that emit an RFID type signal - with a code identifying our address/account and the meter reading. The power company then simply drives through neighborhoods with specially equipped vehicles that reads the meters via RF. We were not charged extra for those.
This is what I expected for ours but it has to be connected to some kind of network as you can go to their website and see your own usage in real time.
