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Our local electric supplier which does suscribe to TVA's 'green power' program and gives some incentives for 'energy star' appliances, recently did the opposite in billing by establishing a 'level cost' program where the customer pays each month an average cost determined by the previous year's usage. As one of my friends who had just signed up for the program glowingly told me, 'Now we can use all the power we want without having to worry about getting hit with a huge bill at the end of the month! You should sign up.' Of course that means that next year's average bill will be correspondingly higher. If this should happen to trigger a conservation response, the customer would see no benefit from it until the following year. I told her it was one of the worst ideas I had heard of in electric billing.
I agree, one year for feedback is simply not enough. A weekly feedback mechanism, or even daily as indicated in this posting will do the best. (I say daily because purchasing more on the cards and a rough output of days remaining gives a strong incentive to alter habits)
Smart meters help with load leveling and consumer consciouness of the problem. They are one part of the larger solution, which firstly can be attributted to negawatts(using current best efficiencies) for the short term solution (Probably yielding 10 years respite from increasing energy prices), a midterm solution of ramping up coal/nuclear/wind/solar, and a longterm solution of closing the output loop and doing full lifecycle analysis upon which time we will have reached a renewable society.