Smart energy meters that can only tell me what I'm using? I have no interest as I could pay £100, have no inconvenience, not have to modify my internal wiring, and get the same effect - except that only I would have access to the data.
Smart energy meters that can cut me off at the will / mistake of a third party? The day you make me use one of those, I ask you to remove all your meters, cables and equipment instead and I put a solar installation on the roof and feed down into MY consumer unit. You'll never see another penny from me again, even if it's at great expense to myself.
There's a reason that we're stuck in the limbo between those two - no way will energy companies force the "cut back service" when they are profiting from providing you with electricity. And no way will they do anything more useful than put in a smart meter to save their guys having to come out to read your meter.
At the moment, even the meter-reading is so infrequent, it's barely worth the price of a single always-on data connection to your meter, for any individual customer. Seriously, what does it cost a minimum-wage employee to knock on your door of an evening and take 2 minutes to read your meter, when you divide his hourly wage by even 10 minutes per household?
The problem is the grand energy saving plans inspire NOBODY who wasn't already doing so (and why should electricity companies help save you electricity? That's like Google being asked to help you cut down on performing Internet searches), the next stage (cut-off / brown-out / separate circuits) is practically impossible to implement and counter to the whole purpose of supplying electricity, and there's nothing in between that anyone actually wants.
Gimme a £100 voucher towards a clamp meter with smartphone app and we can skip stage 1 entirely. Try to implement stage 2 and watch my custom disappear from you forever, while ALSO massively increasing the green credentials of what I do.
Sorry, but whether it's a lightbulb, heater, washing machine or computer, you're aren't going to turn my stuff off if I'm paying for it, proportional to its energy usage. Which leaves you stuffed in territory where you're just wasting money doing things I could have done for myself cheaper.