In the Chicago suburbs the local electric utility (ComEd) has been installing smart meters on residences over the last couple of years. I got mine about 18 mon

In the Chicago suburbs the local electric utility (ComEd) has been installing smart meters on residences over the last couple of years. I got mine about 18 months ago. The meter is Zigbee-capable, so I went out and got a utility-approved gateway to read the meter (the meter allows access only to approved MAC addreses) The Rainforest Automation RAVEn cost me about $50 (it might be discontinued now) http://rainforestautomation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/raven_datasheet_1.8.pdf http://rainforestautomation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/r... There are a number of things you can query from the meter, but mainly you can read the current demand every 4 seconds down to about 10 watts resolution (the Verdigris device is claiming 5-Watt resolution). It's all in a tidy XML format with a published API spec. Long story short, you can play with some of this stuff on your own right now in certain parts of the world.