Justifying widespread AMI deployments because it "will save consumers money" is a time bomb waiting to go off. AMI will not provide significant measureable changes to all customers for probably the next ten years. Not all consumers will change behaviour based on TOU or looking the "future" meter in the house. Quite a few studies have shown that some individuals will watch the meter and take action - but the bulk will not. TOU billing may alter life styles for some - but if you are quite wealthy (and large energy consumer) there may not be sufficient incentive for you to change. Meanwhile low incomes will struggle.

AMI will help eventually with voltage optimizing - but that is in the distant future. It will help in fault dispatch - also in the distant future for many utilities. And finally it can help with automatic fault isolation - but that requires a significant upgrade of relays, recloser, smart transformers, etc -- all in the distant future.

AMI does save utilities money with disconnect/reconnect, and small outages. Meters fail and need to be replaced -- so why not use AMI then. But the hurry to deploy AMI and justify the cost and rate increases because the consumer will benefit from it - is very questionable - it doesn't pass the sniff test.

If AMI is sold to the customers and PUC for what it is capable of performing and possible to fully deploy today - there wouldn't be squabbles. The problem is the meters are being oversold based on consumers immediate savings.

Be realistic and deploy for the long term strategy and not sell the impossible short term.