A recent consumer backlash against demand-response programs in California seems to have caught the industry off guard. The blogosphere (and some traditional media) erupted in a rhetorical bacchanalia after the California Energy Commission proposed including programmable thermostats in the state’s new building codes.

This episode shows just how badly informed consumers are about electricity — and more specifically, about the value of smart meters, time-of-use rates and demand-response programs. It should serve as a wake-up call to the utility industry and its policy makers, who have given almost no attention to public-perception questions in the effort to advance the smart grid.

The fact this occurred in California is all the more revealing. One of the country’s greenest-thinking and most tech-savvy states — the state that commercialized windpower and gave us Menlo Park and Silicon Valley — rightfully should welcome smart meters with open arms. Instead, an inherent distrust of public institutions — and probably a lingering hangover from the California energy crisis — set the state’s demand-management proponents back on their heels.

It seems many California consumers don’t accept anything the industry says at face value — particularly when higher electricity rates are at stake. Claims of environmental benefit seemed only to raise the level of suspicion — invoking images from George Orwell’s 1984, and the more obscure (and much funnier) Brazil, a film directed by Terry Gilliam.

The backlash also might have been fueled by the concerns of civil libertarians and medical marijuana advocates in California, who fear utilities will give time-of-use metering data to drug-enforcement agencies seeking marijuana growing operations. Some Canadian jurisdictions already do this as a matter of course, while others focus on power theft rather than metered use of electricity related to clandestine activities.

Few consumers would argue with using the smart grid to detect power theft. But the industry must walk a fine line. If consumers perceive the smart grid as a truncheon in the hands of the green police — whether that green is the color of cannabis or the environment — they’ll disregard the technology’s conservation and efficiency benefits faster than you can say “doubleplus ungood.”

If the industry finds itself playing defense like the California Energy Commission did in January, then the smart grid revolution could be over before it even begins.