Nonprofit says “Green Button” feature tied to smart meters in Kentucky does not work as billed

Kentucky’s largest electric utility has touted recent smart-meter upgrades as a way to cut costs and improve service, including the ability to check electricity use remotely and handle disconnections and reconnections without sending crews to every meter. In its reporting, Kentucky Lantern says the utility has installed more than 1 million digital “smart” meters in homes and businesses, and that the company has saved tens of millions of dollars in recent years as a result.

The same story describes a dispute over a customer-facing feature known as “Green Button,” which is intended to let consumers access their energy-usage data electronically in a standardized format that can help them reduce consumption and, in turn, bills. Kentucky Lantern reports that a national nonprofit argues that, in practice, the “Green Button” does not work for many customers despite the utility’s smart-meter rollout.

According to Kentucky Lantern, the utility’s smart meters enable it to monitor energy usage remotely and to carry out service actions such as disconnections and reconnections. The nonprofit’s criticism, as described in the report, is that the benefits of that remote capability are not translating into usable, accessible data for customers seeking to manage their electricity costs through the “Green Button” process.

The report does not indicate that the nonprofit is seeking immediate changes through a court filing, nor does it provide details on what steps customers should take when the feature fails to function. Instead, the dispute is presented as a question of whether a tool presented to consumers as bill-helpful is working reliably in Kentucky after the utility’s large-scale meter deployment.

For residents and businesses, the practical impact of the controversy is straightforward. If “Green Button” data access is unreliable or unavailable, customers may be unable to review their usage patterns in time to make changes, compare intervals, or troubleshoot issues that drive higher charges. That can affect families and small operations that rely on predictable utility expenses to budget household and operating costs.

The next steps, based on what Kentucky Lantern reported, hinge on how the utility and regulators respond to the nonprofit’s claims about customer access to usage information. If the issue is tied to software, data formatting, account settings, or customer eligibility for the tool, resolution would likely require coordination among utility systems and any oversight structures governing consumer data and energy-efficiency programming.

Until then, Kentucky customers using smart meters could face continued uncertainty about whether the “Green Button” feature is available and functional for their accounts, even as the utility benefits from the broader operational advantages of remote meter capabilities.