There is something to be said about the inertia, but that might have a lot to do with the bureaucracy that sits above Taipower (ie the politicians).
I've had dealings with the management of a large Taipower supplier, and their impression is that the gov't (that is, a bunch of unschooled vote-buyers) has Taipower firmly by the wotsits. They therefore have little incentive to innovate or to do anything more than the bare minimum required of them (and apparently they don't have the cash reserves anyway, even if they wanted to). The government decides what the prices should be and then throws money at Taipower when the sums don't add up. It's a deeply dysfunctional setup.
I've also met with high-level management at a UK power company and found them to be ... well, not evil, but not very pleasant. During a discussion of tariffs, they mentioned that they have a scam going on with off-peak rates: they promise a certain number of hours of off-peak electricity, but don't specify when those hours will be. So they often shift them around or split them into multiple blocks (say, 1am-3am and then 5am-6am). The aim is to hit the consumer with unexpected full-price electricity when his appliances are running on a timer. It's legit, but seriously sneaky. They guys at the meeting thought it was all quite amusing. Of course, they're not necessarily representative of the company management in general, or of other electricity companies.
Geothermal: I'm clueless about civil engineering, but I would have thought a seismically-active island is not the right place for it. The basic setup, AFAIK, involves a set of very long tubes pumping heat transfer fluid down into the hot rocks. If there's even a small chance of those tubes being fractured, the whole thing is pointless, and possibly dangerous.
There are so many interesting ideas in this discussion, the smart pricing meter sounds great, I know there are many people working on variations of this. You set your minimum parameters and let the devices do the thinking from there. But I do get annoyed at washing machines whirring at 3am in the morning!
Yes, there are similar things out there, but they're aimed specifically at the standard grid with point-source generation. They're also incredibly expensive, mostly because they contain inherently expensive things like GPRS modems. My version is for DC metering in distributed solar installations, which means you can cram in a lot more features for a lot less money. For example, it provides a 200W SELV (60-volt) circuit for low-voltage lighting and electronic appliances. It's impossible to deploy utility-scale solar unless you just shove your generated power back into the grid; at present, you have no other way of selling the electricity. Electricity meters are incredibly boring, but I think this is a critical part of a future renewable-based infrastructure.
