Charlotte is the test ground for Duke Energy’s smart grid technology. So eventually, you can anticipate that something like this will happen here.

After customers refused their smart meters in Santa Cruz and replaced them with analog meters, PG&E cut their power off. It was only restored after a public debate on the matter at a Santa Cruz board of supervisors meeting.

Meanwhile, Duke plows ahead with its own smart grid. The purpose is clear:

“At a time when peak loads are at their highest and outages are costing Americans $150 billion a year, utilities require solutions to help them monitor, detect and control the conditions that ensure a secure and dependable grid. Our open, application-ready, platform will enable Duke and its partners to build and deploy intelligent distributed control solutions.”

And with that, they’ll begin to collect the data that will let them control your energy use in a manner they think best:

Future data received from intelligent devices across our distribution system will be available for enabling the Energy Efficiency Program …

And what is that?

Put simply, it’s what they call Demand Side Management, where utilities reward or punish customers for energy use during non-peak or peak times. And eventually perhaps, as many fear, allow utilities to control whether you can use energy at undesired times at all.

The media and the utilities have sold the upside of this technology as allowing customers to lower their energy bills. Not so, say consumer advocates. In fact, John Norris, Commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is now warning that utilities must stop promising customers this:

“There’s this perception that all of this technology will make electricity less expensive,” John Norris, Commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at GridWeek. “It won’t. It will make it more efficiently priced. So we have to ask, what is the value we can receive from this?”

The hype of cost savings is an important issue, and one that came up repeatedly at GridWeek. The selling point of saving money should be true in the short term, as people know more about their electricity patterns and can curb their usage or sign up for plans that fit their lifestyle. But the real revolution will go far beyond just different pricing plans. Because electricity is not going to get cheaper in the long haul, many experts at GridWeek argued that utilities need to ditch the argument that everyone will save.

The real profit makers here? Many believe that will be utilities, as they charge higher prices for less electricity due to scarcity manufactured by the politicians. This country is wildly rich with untapped energy resources. We only need to extract them.