Regarding ZigBee in the meter
The terminology used by the industry for letting you read data from the meter is “Home Area Network” or HAN – Google smart meter "home area network"
(Or HAN)
In this case the meter is the ZigBee controller. The utility can enable your certified ZigBee HAN device to pair with the meter.
Here’s an old Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/b65pdr/smart_utility_meters_zigbee/
Seems at least one utility is already sunsetting that capability: Heads Up: San Diego Gas & Electric is ditching HAN for smart meters
Regarding receiving the meter mesh network
A number of people have made progress receiving messages sent by their meter and meters in their neighborhood with SDRs. See Landis+Gyr GridStream Protocol - RECESSIM
I was able to capture and decode a bunch of the messages with rtl_433 and an RTL-SDR following other people’s work. The meter MAC addresses match. the uptimes match. I was able to figure out the correct CRC for PSEGLI.
But so far no one has been able to find and crack the usage data. It might be that these are being transmitted at a higher data rate that requires more bandwidth, different encoding, etc.