State laws usually require utility regulators to develop protocols for approving any meters or meteringsystems used to bill customers for electric service.
In January of last year, cybersecurity researcher Travis Goodspeed gave a presentation at the S4 conference in Miami where he described a way to bypass encryption on Zigbee wireless chips, which some smart electric meteringsystems would use to communicate.
"This could easily degenerate into chaos, " concedes Paul Heitman, a senior program architect at Comverge, which hopes to extend its metering expertise for air-conditioning systems to plug-in cars.