The utility may have wanted to disconnect their capacity to do business from things like telephones and dumb, greedy air conditioners, but what they also enabled with these new meters is “net metering” by means of which homemade electricity, from rooftop solar panels, for example, can be fed back into the grid. The utility has to pay you for this power and the smart meter helps them keep track of how much they owe you at the end of each billing cycle. As of 2015, all the states except South Dakota, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee had active net meter policies in place. In 2012, however,
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