Snoop-wary Texans rebel against new smart meters

DALLAS • Thelma Taormina keeps a pistol at her Houston-area home to protect against intruders. But one of the last times she used it, she said, was to run off a persistent utility company worker who was trying to replace her old electricity meter with a new digital unit. “This is Texas.” she declared at a recent public hearing on the new meters. “We have rights to choose what appliances we want in our home.” A nationwide effort to upgrade local power systems with modern equipment has run into gr...