Smart Meters in Massachusetts: What They Actually Do and What They Mean for Solar Owners

If you've had a new meter show up on the side of your house, or you've seen contractors going door to door across your town, you've probably heard some conflicting things about what's happening. I've had people ask me if these new meters cause cancer, if they're spying on them, or if it's some Bluetooth device beaming radiation into their house. So I dug into it and I'm laying out exactly what's true, what's exaggerated, and what it means if you're a solar owner or thinking about going solar.

I'm Dave Simmer, a NABCEP-trained solar designer based in Scituate. I've handled site assessment, system design, and utility interconnection paperwork for 1,800+ homes across Massachusetts since 2011, which means I deal with net metering and utility infrastructure on every single project. This is the kind of question I get asked constantly, so here's the straight version.

What's Actually Happening

National Grid, Eversource, and Unitil are all in the middle of a Department of Public Utilities-approved rollout, replacing older meters with new digital ones statewide. This isn't optional on the utility's end, and it isn't a fringe program. It's a funded, multi-year infrastructure project.

Eversource's network went live on July 21, 2025, and the utility had installed 100,000 meters by January 2026, with a target of finishing its full rollout, more than 1.5 million meters across 159 Massachusetts communities, by the end of 2027. The DPU-approved budget for Eversource's program is $668 million, funded through a Grid Modernization Factor that's already showing up on your bill at roughly $1.75 a month, with the potential to rise toward $5 a month as the program continues. National Grid is installing more than 1.4 million electric smart meters across its own Massachusetts territory on a similar timeline.

Your old meter, if you haven't been switched yet, is what's called an AMR meter, Automatic Meter Reading. It gets read about once a month, sometimes by a truck driving by picking up a one-way radio signal. One reading a month is all your utility has ever known about your usage.

How the New Meters Work

The new meters are AMI, Advanced Metering Infrastructure. Eversource is using the Itron Gen5 Riva platform. Here's what it actually does differently from your old meter:

It records usage every 15 minutes, close to 100 data points a day instead of one a month. It communicates continuously with the utility over a private wireless mesh network, not your home Wi-Fi and not Bluetooth. It measures electricity flowing in both directions, which matters a lot if you have solar, since it's what tracks power you send to the grid versus power you pull from it. And it can detect outages automatically and notify the utility before a customer even picks up the phone.

These meters also have the technical ability to be remotely connected or disconnected by the utility without a truck being sent out, which is one of the efficiency gains utilities point to when justifying the cost of the program. It's worth knowing that capability exists, without needing to treat it as alarming, it's mostly used for things like move-ins, move-outs, and non-payment situations that used to require a truck roll.

Who's Actually Showing Up at Your Door

It's not always utility employees doing the physical install. Eversource contracts this work to Grid One Solutions, a subsidiary of Asplundh, and their technicians carry Grid One ID badges and drive marked vehicles. National Grid and Unitil both contract with Utility Partners of America, UPA, and their technicians carry a National Grid Contractor badge with their photo. If anyone shows up to swap your meter without visible ID and a marked vehicle, that's a reason to not let them touch it and to call your utility directly to confirm.

Is There a Health Risk?

I'll give it to you straight. These meters do emit radiofrequency energy, RF, to communicate with the network. That's real. But it's the same general category of non-ionizing radiation as your Wi-Fi router, your cell phone, or a baby monitor, and it's regulated by the FCC. Exposure levels from a smart meter sit well below federal safety limits, and organizations including the American Cancer Society have reviewed the research and found no established link between smart meters and cancer. RF energy in general carries a broad "possibly carcinogenic" classification that covers a lot of everyday technology, and the actual exposure from a meter on the side of your house is a small fraction of what you get from a phone in your pocket.

Where there's a genuinely fair conversation to have is around data privacy, not cancer risk. Granular usage data can reveal patterns about when you're home and what appliances you're running, and that's a reasonable thing to ask your utility about.

Can You Opt Out?

Yes, all three utilities are required to offer a residential opt-out, but it isn't free.

Eversource sends a 90-day advance notification letter before your installation. Opt out within that 90-day window and the one-time $42 exchange fee is waived. Miss the window and that $42 fee applies if you want to swap back. Either way, there's an ongoing $34 a month charge for manual meter reading.

National Grid's ongoing opt-out fee is $26 a month.

A few things people don't expect: opting out doesn't mean keeping your old analog meter, that one's being retired regardless. You'd get a new, non-communicating digital meter instead and still pay the manual-read fee. Opt-out is also limited to residential accounts on specific rate classes, and landlords can't opt out on behalf of tenants. There are two bills currently sitting in the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, S.2306 and H.3551, that would eliminate opt-out fees and require written consent before installation. Neither has come up for a vote, so don't plan around either one passing before your installation date.

What This Means If You Have Solar

This is the part that connects to what I do every day. If you're on net metering, the meter is the device tracking every kilowatt-hour you send to the grid and every one you pull back, and the new bidirectional measurement is more precise than what the old meters offered. The 15-minute interval data is also genuinely useful if you're trying to understand your system's actual production and consumption patterns, or figure out whether a battery makes sense for your home.

One detail worth knowing: Unitil currently requires a smart meter for net metering customers, with no opt-out available if you want to keep your net metering agreement. Eversource and National Grid haven't imposed that same requirement as of now, but it's a detail worth being aware of if you're already interconnected or considering solar on one of those utilities.

The Bottom Line on Smart Meters

This is a real, state-approved infrastructure upgrade, not a conspiracy, and the cancer fears circulating online don't hold up against the actual science. The legitimate questions are around cost if you opt out, and privacy, not health. If you have solar or you're thinking about it, the more precise usage data these meters generate is a genuine upgrade, it just means understanding what you're looking at matters more than ever. For the full picture on what makes solar pay off financially in Massachusetts, see my complete Massachusetts solar incentives guide.

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