Comment: I don't have a smart meter

and my bill went up. ...substantially. And it still is.

Funny thing is that since I'm in the industry, tangentially, I can do the research to find out that prices have and will rise tremendously. That much is a given. What else one might learn is that our grid is horribly inefficient (like 30%) in allocating resources toward future predictions. This is the biggest lump cost in your entire bill. If the utilities were able to trend and predict demand better, you could see a ~20% drop in prices by them being able to shut off unneeded generation and transmission lines. But no, you don't want them to know what your loads track like.

So pay.