"The purchasers would have had a plan to reduce the cost of...

"The purchasers would have had a plan to reduce the cost of reading the meters and make lots of lovely dosh. If the meter company can sit in its office and have the meters send their data to a computer they should be able to reap large cost savings on having meter readers wondering about."

Depending on to what extent they can pass the costs of "smart metering" on to customers, then this may not be correct.

As far as I know, typical cost to a water/energy utility to read a meter is typically <$1/read. And for a "dumb" meter they do this 4 times a year to generate quarterly bills (so $4/year/house for meter reading.

Makes it hard to get any cost saving from using technology due to the fact that meters aren't manually read.