My utility company told me they could do this, but I know for a fact they cannot. My power meter broadcasts its instantaneous reading in short plain text packets at a frequency once every few seconds. They told me all my power usage was hot water. I’m sure it’s HVAC and computers, which didn’t even show up in their list.

This turns out to be a bad thing. Enough people are uninformed or don’t care about their privacy that over time an option that doesn’t sell customer data loses customers and becomes more expensive and gets cancelled.