It's important to remember that POCOs are highly regulated, and they're not allowed to frivolously charge whatever they feel like, even in high demand conditions (probably state-dependent, but that's at least the case here in CA).

ML applications
What do you mean by that?

And I see where you're coming from. At this point in the world, where just about every data point about a person/household is tabulated and used in ways to coerce you to spend more money, I just feel like this is low on the priority scale. The utilities' motivation for smart meters is mostly labor cost reduction (meter readers). The remainder is real time grid load monitoring and statistics that better enables them to manage surge generation to keep costs down. This comes from a family friend that's a higher up in SoCal Edison. They legit don't care if someone is using an industrial grade sex machine or growing weed (though the municipality might). The biggest issue I can see with this, like anything else and as you alluded to, is data security/privacy.