While smart meters can be limited to just reporting the entire household electricity use, and thus don't need to gather information from appliance use inside the home, people should be aware that the goal of AMI is to monitor electricity use of every appliance inside your home, and possibly control it.
To quote a US Department of Energy document on AMI, it's defined as "This infrastructure includes home network systems, including communicating thermostats and other in-home controls, smart meters, communication networks from the meters to local data concentrators, back-haul communications networks to corporate data centers, meter data management systems (MDMS) and, finally, data integration into existing and new software application platforms." See page 5 of
http://www.netl.doe.gov/smartgrid/referenceshelf/whitepapers/AMI%20White%20paper%20final%20021108%20%282%29%20APPROVED_2008_02_12.pdf .
Not only that, the electric utility industry is currently exploring the use of "big data" techniques to collect and sort through all the data gathered from customers' homes. One upcoming conference for the utility industry on big data techniques is described at
http://utilityanalyticsweek.com/details#1AdvancedAnalytics . In its most benign form, your electric utility might constantly nag you that your refrigerator uses too much power and should be replaced or you leave too many lights on, but in a full AMI implementation they will have the capability of actually shutting down appliances in your home remotely.
As another piece of evidence, I live in Boulder, CO, which was supposed to be the first "Smart Grid" city in the nation as part of a demo project installed by the utility Xcel. The first thing they did was install smart meters and a fiber optic network reaching every customer home and business in Boulder. I wondered at the time why they needed the huge bandwidth of fiber; now I know. Fortunately, the costs overruns of installing fiber in the city killed the project (originally priced at $15 million, it went to $45 million).
