I saw a fascinating (and worrisome) documentary on energy, on public television. Fascinating was seeing the generation and distribution of power. Worrisome was seeing the ideas people had in their head with smart meters - in particular involuntary shut-down of appliances. Not just shutting power to the entire meter like they do now in their planned rolling blackouts, but somehow having the capability (and authority?!?!) to tinker with individual appliances and thermostat settings.
Then it got real bad. The host was in a helicopter, equipped with heat sensing technology. The purpose of the flight was to map out which houses were hotter than others, and which were leaking ‘too much’ heat. This is an ongoing project - your house may already be in a database as ‘non-compliant’...and I could see the nexus of this database and federal control over home lending: i.e. no FHA backed loan until the seller installs more insulation (and no doubt hires some crony ‘expert’ to supervise the project).
You see the precursors to this with the rollout of NEST thermostats that monitor and report usage, smart appliances that have the intelligence and connectivity to be turned down or off by a central command, and utility companies pushing people toward “let us turn off stuff when we have demand and you’ll get rebates” that easily morph into “if you use power when you want, we can punish you”.