The electric industry wants to maintain control and the meter vendors want to sell wireless devices.. when in reality the Internet carriers have won the battle to the building using copper or fiber.

The architecture should be something like:

1. Add an ethernet port to the meter using copper or fiber ports.

2. Allow the building owner to dictate the network connection which could be wireless or a cable connection to their existing router to the Internet

3. The utility then picks up the data via their internal network or via the public Internet using private VPN's from the building to their data center.

4. This allows for alternate energy companies to have direct access to the native data coming off the power panel/meter.

Point 4 above goes against the power utility as they want to control the data and give "only" what they want to the alternate energy provider.