San Diego Gas & Electric Co. is set to begin in March its long-planned rollout of "smart meters" to residences throughout the county.

Escondido is scheduled to be the first to get the digital meters, which will enable the utility and, eventually, customers to better control electricity and gas use, at home or over the Internet.

Getting the full benefit from the smart meters will take a couple years. Installation will last through the end of 2011, said Chris Baker, the utility's chief of information technology. For some of the more advanced uses, Baker said, customers will have to buy their own equipment.

It's a big job: SDG&E's service area covers San Diego County and southwest Orange County north to Dana Point. In that territory, the utility has 1.4 million electric meters that will be entirely replaced; and 900,000 gas meters, which will be fitted with communication modules.

Smart meters will allow different energy rates to be charged based on the time of day, as opposed to the flat rate charged today. SDG&E says customers could earn rebates for voluntarily reducing their energy use during peak times.

The smart meters, made by Itron Inc. of Liberty Lake, Wash., have been tested in the San Diego community of Tierrasanta since July.

Deployment in Escondido was supposed to begin this month. An article on the Web site Greentech Media attributed the delay to security vulnerability with the smart meters. However, Rich Creegan, Itron's vice president of marketing, said that wasn't quite right.

"There have been no incidents that have occurred in any of our deployed meters," he said.

Creegan said the smart meters employ encryption standards of the same strength used for financial transactions. There has been additional security testing, he said, to reaffirm that the smart meters are secure, "for today and tomorrow."

Escondido was chosen to begin deployment because it is a modestly-sized city that should not be too challenging a start. Installation will be complete by August, Baker said.

The smart meters will require only the same space as the old electrical meters, Baker said, so homeowners won't have to do anything -- except make sure the installer has access to the meter. Customers should be ready for an outage of about five minutes while the smart meters are installed. People will be notified by mail and by phone as to when SDG&E will come to change their meters.

Wireless communications between the smart meters and the utility will provide benefits to customers, said smart meter advocate Michael Shames, executive director of the San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action Network.

"It makes what is now a dumb, one-way energy system into a smarter, two-way system," Shames said. "As a result, it gives customers better control of their energy consumption."

Customers will be able to monitor their energy usage in real time. They'll even be able to hook up their appliances in a local network and control them through the Internet: No more vacation worries about leaving the stove on.

With smart meters, customers could set their air conditioning to turn on a hour before they arrive home from work, Shames said.

SDG&E will also benefit from the two-way communications. Because they can be read remotely, the smart meters will eliminate the need for routine visits by meter readers.

Shames cautioned that the smart meters could be used against customers, by allowing utilities to impose mandatory controls on energy use. Utilities could even make customers pay in advance, like a pre-paid cellular phone, and shut off the power automatically if the bill is not paid on time.

Such practices are now prohibited by the state, Shames said, but it's possible utilities will push to have those restrictions lifted once the smart meters are in place.

For more information, call (800) 411-7343 or visit www.sdge.com/smartmeter.

Contact staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at (760) 739-6641 or bfikes@nctimes.com. Read his blogs at bizblogs.nctimes.com.