I have a Landis+Gyr meter with which I was able to see hourly usage via the PG&E website when I was on the E-1 tariff. However, when I switched to the E-9A Tariff I could no longer see my hourly usage. But it's still a "smart meter" in that it is radio communicating my usage to PG&E. When I called to change to E-9A, the woman I spoke with had to check if my meter was in the "right configuration" to do TOU. It was and she said they will reprogram my meter for TOU. My guess as to why after converting to E-9A that I can't get hourly information follows...
The hourly information for one day used to be reported sometime later on the next day. I imagine that the meter has a number of buckets to track power usage. "Reprogramming" means instead of 24 hourly buckets of information, it has a different set of buckets, say 12am to 7am, 7am to 2pm, 2pm to 5pm, 5pm to 9pm, and 9pm to 12am. Now these new time ranges have to be more reliable than the hourly buckets. I remember some days missing from my hourly information, but the month was right. I imagine that these TOU buckets have to be reliable which means that they don't have to report everyday. The meter needs to function on its own for many days without communicating back home. But the point is that the meter only can manage so many buckets at once and would not be able to manage hourly buckets along side these reliable TOU buckets. Nor would the web site software know what to do with these TOU buckets.
So yea, it's not great. A big point of the smart meter was to be able to report quickly to users how much power they were using to get people to change habits. But that isn't going to work if you can't report this information. The reality of smart meters is probably that the utilities will no longer need error prone meter readers walking the streets and that's really what counts the most to them. They don't care about people using less power, they want people using more power but they have to put a good face on for the regulators. It's shameful. There are too few TOU customers to make the website work. For that matter I think the outsourced the website they have as you must enable third party cookies for it to work.
But I can see that PG&E has bigger problems then getting the website to work with TOU smart meters. Just getting people to accept them is proving hard enough. And with their gas transmission problems... I would not want to be working for PG&E these days. They're in hell.