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California Utilities to Control Thermostats?
TeraBill writes "It seems that the California Energy Commission is looking to give utilities in the state the power to control the thermostats in private homes via a radio signal. The idea is that during times of significant energy crunch, the utilities could force thermostats to higher temperatures rather than having to implement a rolling blackout. The thermostats have been around for a while and new ones were on display at the CES show in Vegas this week. While I can see the argument for it, we just had a kid take over a tram system with a remote control, so how long before our thermostat gets hacked by the neighbors. And I'd almost rather have the power drop than have someone significantly raise the temperature in my home if I had a computer running there. (UPS and a graceful shutdown versus cooking something.)"
yeah, ban home A/C except cooling for one room if there's an elderly people or someone with a similar vulenarbility living in the house.
This is the sort of naive, knee-jerk reaction that makes sense when you don't understand how the grid works.
People don't give two shakes of a rat's ass how the grid works. We pay (quite a lot, IMO) for a 24/7 service, and expect it to goddamn-well work when we need it. And at 2pm in July in SoCal during a santa anna, you need air conditioning.
TFA is about a solution to high peak loads.
TFA "solves" the problem by depriving people of the right to decide what to spend their money on.
Don't get me wrong - I fully support some fairly extreme energy conservation measures. But without exception, we need to get people to "choose" to adopt them out of financial pressures, rather than compulsorily. Can't get people to use CFLs? Put a tax on incandescents to make them cost the same as CFLs, and watch their usage plummet. Can't get people to raise the thermostat? At $0.50/KWh, you'll see just how many people can get by at 80F rather than 72F. Can't get people to stop driving SUVs with single-digit fuel efficiency? Yeah, $5+ per gallon gasoline will end that trend this summer.
But in all of those, you can still choose to pay the same for shorter-lived less-efficient lightbulbs; You can still choose to keep the AC at 65F; You can still choose to start the Ford Exploder 15 minutes early to let it warm up for your daily trip to the end of the driveway to get the mail. And some people will - But not many, and I'll thank the fools who do for subsidizing the cost of clean air at the same time they try to maximize their personal waste.