Utility customers in Texas can sign up for prepaid electricity. First Choice Power is offering residential smart meter users the first prepaid electric service that will tally usage exactly as opposed to using estimates. The drawback of estimates is that customers could never be sure when their accounts would be depleted.

Smart meters, though, give consumers the ability to track usage in real time so they will know when to add money to their account.  Prepaid accounts also enable consumers to get power without having to put money down for a deposit or go through a credit check. It also prevents utilities from having to deal with non-payment of bills.

First Choice Power President Brian Hayduk says the utility “is actively working to develop product offerings and enhancements that will open up a wide range of information and automation capabilities for Texas consumers. These products and enhancements will allow First Choice Power customers to understand more about how, when and why they use electricity -- giving them the information they need to manage and reduce their energy consumption and cost.”

First Choice is currently running a limited test of the service but has not yet announced how much they will charge for the prepaid service when it is deployed later this year. There are about currently around 800,000 installed smart meters in Texas, with plans for another 1.6 million to be deployed in 2010. By 2013, an estimated 5.7 million smart meters will be deployed throughout the state

Similarly, by the end of 2013, millions of homes and businesses in Victoria, Australia, will have smart meters. Rather than wait until they are deployed to charge customers, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) started charging all Victorian electricity customers for the smart meters on January 1, 2010, even if their smart meter had yet to be deployed.

But even before the first wave of smart meters is deployed, start-ups are tweaking the technology advances. For example, Agilewaves is developing a monitoring system that reads electric, gas and water usage from via sensors and links them through an integration panel within an entire building – without involving the utility. Instead, Agilewaves is marketing building owners directly. The information gleaned from the sensors can be sent to computers, mobile devices or third party monitoring services.

Sensor systems are particularly useful in buildings because they can immediately identify problems such as HVAC systems that are running cooling and heating simultaneously, systems that are on when not needed, lights that can be turned off at night.

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