Following up here in case anyone cares. Four months after requesting my gas meter upgrade, the gas company finally came out yesterday and did the meter installation. We now have a full 1.5 million BTUs of capacity available. Woo-Hoo! A few notes on my journey:
1) Based on some other threads on here, I asked the gas company about installing a higher-pressure (2 psi) meter that would give me more capacity with smaller sized pipes. The guy at the gas company said he hadn't heard about doing that and would check into it. Based on his response (i.e. the fact that it didn't seem like something be did all the time), I then called the town gas inspector, and he said that it would take an "act of god" to get that approved. Basically around here they don't normally do that except for commercial buildings. Since this process was already painful enough, I quickly abandoned that idea. In our case we had most of the existing plumbing sized OK, just a way-undersized meter, so it wasn't as big a deal. But apparently the higher PSI meter with local regulators is an area-dependent thing.
2) The meter upgrade would have been no charge, but we were charged $1500 since the line feeding our house was 1/2" and could only supply 750K BTUs. $1500 covered up to 100 feet of line, and then there would have been an additional per-foot charge if we were further from the main. We were 95 feet - bonus!
The guys were out here all day, probably 8:30am - 7:30pm. Our soil is apparently particularly rocky, so the trenching was a big pain. We had probably 3-4 National Grid trucks out here plus an excavator - so for $1500 I guess we got our moneys worth. They ended up hitting probably 10 sprinkler lines, plus the sprinkler wires on the dig, but fixed them. Luckily they spared the Verizon FiOS line!
Anyway, a long, drawn out process, but we finally have enough gas supply for our appliances!
Here's a pic of the new meter with a big-honking 2" pipe coming out of it. Definitely an oddly shaped meter - haven't seen one like this before....