said by Jack_in_VA:said by Bob4:When your power is off for a week and a half, you give up calling.
Scenario: Power company restores power after a week-long outage. Tripped circuit breaker on a pole transformer prevents everyone from getting power back. Power company thinks everyone has been restored, but they haven't. People don't call because they don't realize the service should have been restored (how would they even know?).
With smart meters, the power company would have realized these people had not been restored and would have fixed the problem.
I don't know about your POCO but Dominion Virginia Power always follows up by phone after a customer reports an outage. They would know the people you cite still had no power.
My god how have we made it this long?
JCP&L also follows up by phone but you're dreaming if you think they can call up hundreds of thousands of customers. What they usually do is send out automated messages, often to people still without power, telling them that their power is back.
Meanwhile with our coop we can report an outage via text message and get a text message when it is restored. And they're usually accurate.
But I can understand your resistance to smart meters, which may enable time of day billing. You may even have to set your thermostat and start conserving energy for a change instead of wasting it. Oh, the horror!