How widely implemented is it? I lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, lived in half a dozen places (moving between Glendale Water and Power and LADWP). A few years ago, when shopping for houses all over the LA area I would peek to see if they had smart meters, too. I've only seen a few and never lived anywhere that had them.

There may have been seasonal price changes with dumb meters, but they couldn't have done weekday/weekend without them.

Smart water meters seemed to have decent distribution. Perhaps because of the droughts?

I believe most of Edison moved over to smart meters, and they're the biggest provider in SoCal. LADWP is rolling it out at a snail's pace.

That's good to know. Edison always showed up when looking for programs like solar or a smart thermostat, LADWP never did. I just never lived anywhere serviced by Edison. Looking at their service map, it looks like Edison covers everywhere around LA/Glendale and covers a very large area all the way to the Nevada and Arizona border.

I wonder if there's a better cost/benefit for rolling it out to a sparsely populated (or dense pockets with large areas in between)? Where LADWP may favor new construction or something?

Edison pretty much charges 2-3x more for peak usage, 30% more for "off-peak", and 20% less for sleeping hours compared to LADWP depending on tier. So they made a bunch more money since people don't just suddenly shift all their electricity usage to after midnight. I remember there being a lot of outage when they rolled out smart metering since most people had pretty drastic increases to their electric bill.