Ick. This is a very heavy-handed approach. GSM is a really expensive and difficult way to talk to individual appliances. Better to use something like powerline networking or wifi or ANT+ and have a single access point (fusebox) that can talk to everything on the power network and relay upstream by whatever channel is convenient. There are systems that can monitor (but not control) all appliances by 'fingerprinting' the noise that they add to the power network, and then it's possible to get reasonable stats via look-up tables (it doesn't need to be super-accurate) on all appliances without having to add any extra hardware other than a single monitoring device.

You could just use an in-line voltage regulator to reduce the total intake into your house. In the UK the national grid puts out an AVERAGE of 240V, VPhase (www.vphase.co.uk) units regulate that down to 220V and provide a steady stream to your appliances. This not only reduces your bills, but extends you electrical devices' lives!

After six months of having a solar array that is connected to the gird, the most important lesson I've learned is that we need a hardware/software system that allows a smart meter to send a message to a smart circuit breaker that disconnects the 220 breakers (US) when there is a sudden loss of power from the grid, and a battery backup system that kicks in when that happens. Right now it is not the plugs that tech should concentrate on, but the circuit breaker box.

If the UK government was really concerned about us changing to more power efficient appliances, they would not be changing us all over to digital. Digital TV and the high amount of electricity it uses is appalling but soon they will be encouraging/forcing us to move to digital radio. I have a wind up radio and to wind it up for 1 minute gets about 1 hour or more of FM radio - the same 1 minute of wind-up gets only 5 minutes of digital radio! Don't lets pretend that the government does anything to protect the environment, the move to make you spend more on updating your appliances is chiefly for the benefit of the companies selling you the appliances

You can always use the appliance module as shown @ enerficient's web site. http://www.enerficient.com.au/products/appliancemodule.html
The appliance module does exactly the same as the smart plug only it is wireless and reports back to a router where you can view the consumption through a web interface.
There is also a solution for the circuit breaker box. You can do all of that that you are after morriss003. Hope on to the website and if you do not find what you are after talk to me and will explain.

The goal of the MyPower Energy Management Platform is the capture of finely grained power consumption data at the appliance level from a cross section of households. The data warehouse on the cloud will store the data that will be a valuable resource to a variety of stakeholders including the home consumers (to make sensible decisions on the timing of use and optimal replacement , electricity service providers (to help them manage their peak loads better, and to offer more value added services), appliance manufacturers (to help design more innovative products), and to relevant government agencies (to create data-driven policies to encourage energy conservation, design better pricing models etc).
Appliance level data is critical; over 52% of all Australian greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the residential sector arise from appliances.
The SMS costs can be lowered through bulk contracts and will be free to participating households. wi-fi would be better but for patchy coverage.

The use of SMS by a machine is illegal in most places.

This is almost like reinventing the wheel If one visits the Maplin UK site one can find all kinds of proven gizmos to do just what they are trying to do here. Why would I want my consumption data to be on the internet in the first place ? There are $19.95 devices available in US that do the same job and store the logs and data within the device itself. The electric company does not care what your per device / appliance consumption is. YOU DO and you need that information.
BTW we too have 240/250 volt supply in India. Using 220 V certified European appliances leads to overheating and higher consumption. I used the basics of electrical engineering to solve the problem. I started off with a 240 V primary to 30 volt /20 amp secondary ISOLATED transformer. Connected the windings as an auto transformer such that I got a 275-245-0 volt autotransformer. Now I connected the input to the 275-0 V taps and took the output from 245-0 v taps. In this configuration with the input being 245 volts I got my output to be app 220 volts. Most of the power was transmitted type and very little was of transformed type. Eliminated overheating altogether, increased the appliance life AND reduced my energy bill.

jdavis, you're missing a few things there. Individual appliances only need to communicate locally, there's really no need for them to be able to talk to the wider internet directly - numerous appliances each with their own GSM radio, sim card, connection (and security) problems is just asking for trouble, expense and inefficiency. Certainly where I am, wifi to my router and ADSL up from that is cheaper and far more reliable than my GSM connection, and a powerline network would be more reliable still. You could reasonably use SMS for a centralised uplink, but doing it for every appliance separately is just crazy.
As far as tracking individual appliances goes, a line noise analyser has the enormous advantage of being able to get data for individual appliances without any hardware changes, and when you add a new appliance, you just plug it in and it's automatically tracked, even if you plug several into the same outlet. It may not be quite as accurate as a real individual meter, but knowing whether your fridge pulls 200 or 205W is far less significant than knowing whether you have a fridge or not.

Synchro, your point about connection and security in the kind of SMS network that we propose is well taken. One of our challenges is to adequately address this in our prototype and pilot.
I would, however, draw your attention to the goals of our project which is briefly stated in my previous post. This is not a solution for individual homes only; it is about building a large data repository of highly disaggregated appliance-level consumption data to enable us to extract and mine actionable knowledge for a range of stakeholders.