Smart meters in Aus

discussed here.
I still think you're pushing the proverbial uphill if you expect individual consumers to watch the spot price of electricity every hour of every day and plan accordingly. Campaigns to have people start their dishwashers at 3am are likely to have the same effect.
The most exciting part is the ability of these meters to cut electricity by acting as a switch that can be controlled remotely.
One option might be to start collating a couple hundred households as a single unit (with their smart meters). Given enough real time data, a middleman could earn enough to sit between you and the power company saving money and generation capacity, a nice wee earner for those ageing baby boomers sitting around on the coast playing with this interwebby thing.
I think an issue that isn't often mentioned is that public companies that have since gone private have inherited a large asset base of mechanical meters with lifetimes of 30+ years. Everyone pays rent for having one of these sitting in their house and i suspect losing a nice free income stream comes pretty low on most metering company To Do lists.