Hi,
I have done something similar using a Nano with simple photoresistor to pick up when the red LED pulses on my home electric meter. The nano relays this pulse by 434/433Mhz transmitter to another Arduino that has an LCD crystal display. Im measuring the time between each pulse and calculating a rate of energy consumption in kWh. Simple maths when you know that the meter pulse rate is 1 imp = 1 Wh. The code is simply an analogRead and triggers a serial transmission when a certain threshold is reached, i.e. > 500 - indicating the red light on the meter has flashed. You could always log the pulses at an SD card every 1 minute or 30 mins etc.
To communicate directly to the meter's silicon over IR should be simple. Theres plenty of Arduino projects using IR communication. However I would guess that the meter has an access code for read/write operations, or maybe just for write operations. Also the DLMS COSEM object model looks fairly heavy weight.
I would be very interested to hear how you get on with this.
first post btw 