Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats
Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats
7 comments
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Why doesn't Texas connect to the federal US power grid? It certainly isn't freedom for its customers.
a Houston homeowner, didn’t have to touch her thermostat to pitch in. Her utility company remotely shut off her air conditioner nine times that day as part of a power-saving strategy
9 times a day? I get annoyed at setting the oven microwave clocks each time but 9 times would be too much. And each day! That's not freedom that Texas wants - they want to keep a deliberately bad grid away from federal inspection that would require the company to spend money on upgrading and updating their shit.
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But but but muh ffreedum!
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I'm not in Texas, but on a similar plan. Initially it got me a free ecobee thermostat, now I get I think a yearly credit. It's not much, but in the 3+ years I've had it I think I've noticed them adjusting it twice. Certainly not 9 times a day. And I don't think they shut off heat/ac just adjust the temp a few degrees.
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We have this program through Xcel and you correctly describe how theirs works. During peak periods our hold temp at the thermostat might go up a couple degrees for a few hours during peak usage
We’ve never noticed it due to any discomfort from the adjusted temp.
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Yeah fuck all that. They can keep their discount.
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One way to address this is to give customers more control over how they participate. Octopus Energy, for instance, agrees not to let customers’ homes rise above a maximum temperature they choose, and it guarantees their cars will be fully charged by a time they pick. Customers can override the automatic shutdowns any time, but Octopus says fewer than five percent of them do.
“We recognize how sacred the thermostat and the AC is in Texas,” said Daniel Kirwin, a product manager for the Octopus Energy virtual power plant. “We don’t want to be intrusive if we do not have to.”
Hmm.
I mean, that can improve efficiency, but it's kind of limited.
I'd think that it'd make more sense to let someone put a bid on various temperatures. Like, rather than just having a hard maximum temperature, It'd be nice to have some mechanism to scale usage.
Like, I'd rather prioritize energy usage based on energy price. I'm willing to pay a lot to keep my fridge keeping the temperature of food down. But I don't care that much about air conditioning...as long as the price stays below a certain level. And I care a lot less about climate control if I'm not at the residence.
considers
Like, it'd be nice to just have a home automation system like OpenHAB or Home Assistant take a current electricity price, and then take action based on that. Problem is, that's complicated enough that the vast bulk of people aren't going to configure something like that. Like, anything you set up needs to involve pretty minimal user involvement, has to be simpler than a bunch of computer programmer hobbyists gluing things together.
And I'd like to not have a lot of information on what I'm doing in my house pushed upstream to be data-mined, which has been a chronic problem with putting a provided-by-someone-else computer system in my house/car/etc. You don't need to have that pushed upstream to have perfectly-reasonable home automation.
Another issue is that you don't want to have your windows open if your air conditioner is on, but you very much do if it's going to be off for an extended period of time. Houses can't generally open and close windows automatically. But...if there's a ventilation system, that can be kicked on, uses a lot less power than the compressor on an air conditioner.
I guess I'd like to have HVAC control coupled with information about whether I'm home, and just let me set "bid" prices for what I consider worthwhile for various systems.
Hmm.
Another UI problem is that electricity prices shift over time, just due to inflation. If people use nominal bid prices and forget to update them, over time, their electricity usage will be cut down. So from a UI standpoint, you'd want to have some kind of correction -- maybe real prices, maybe some kind of index off the typical price of electricity (so that if electricity generation gets a lot cheaper, you can automatically take advantage of it).
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FtfA: “who signed up for the energy-saving program in exchange for a discount on her monthly power bill.”
But there are other reasons - willingness to have temporary higher temps in exchange for fewer/no brownouts/blackouts.