They're not for your benefit - it's naive in the extreme to believe that the electric companies have any interest in saving you money
That's it in a nutshell. Why would the energy suppliers be clamouring to pay hundreds of pounds per home for free meters for you so as to merely enable you to buy less of their product from them, with no benefit to themselves (and the government, who offer them incentives and/or give them targets with huge fines if unmet)?
They have NEVER mentioned this capability or desire to use it in ANY of their advertising when they've been encouraging/urging/cajoling/guilting you to get them fitted. People who have been cautioning against it all along for this reason (and there are several others) have been sneered at, called conspiracy theorists and told they're being stupid and ridiculous.
Domestic power will also be the victim of shrinkflation: as (if) people use less and less of it, the price will simply go up per unit, as they will still have costs to cover, employees to pay and profit levels to protect. Modern home appliances use a fraction of the energy their equivalents from 20 years ago did, but has anybody seen the benefit in considerably lower bills? Or have they just continued to rise regardless?
Beware the Internet Of Things - again, that's for their benefit and not yours. Ask yourself why you as a consumer could possibly want your toaster or kettle to be connected to the internet.
It's the same with electric cars. It's true that by transferring the pollution caused by producing the energy of a vehicle from the vehicle itself to the power station, you eliminate pollution in city centres; but it's also true that a car fuelled by petrol or diesel is completely independent and unconnected, in that, as long as you have enough fuel, you can go pretty much wherever you want with it without being tracked (as long as you avoid spy smart motorways and conurbations with CCTV/ANPR cameras).
The long-term plan for electric vehicles, to overcome concerns about charging at home and batteries dying before you reach a place where you can recharge, is for wireless charging as you drive along smart motorways and other connected-up roads. By using your car on major roads, you will be charging it. Maybe it could be brought to every road, possibly by adapting street lamps. If they have the technology to wirelessly transmit power to your car to charge the battery, do you really think the same frequencies couldn't be used to disable a crucial part of the engine just as well?
In the not too distant future, it would be extremely simple for your driverless car (well, not actually yours, as individual car ownership will be scrapped before long) to 'talk' to the grid, receive an alert that an occupant might be wanted by the police/government (whether for a serious crime, minor infringement, tweeting an unpopular opinion etc; and whether you actually committed it or are just believed to have/are mistaken for somebody else), disable the human override function, lock the doors and deliver you to the nearest pollice station or government facility without your having any means to resist.
Whether they will do this or simply could if they wanted to.... who knows? People will read what I just wrote and call me crazy and ridiculous. Many of those same people would also have reacted the same way a few years ago to anybody suggesting the idea that electricity companies might have the ability and want the power to simply remotely 'cancel' you from the grid without warning or discussion.