And you can avoid grid failures proactively for a comparatively very small inconvenience. The only thing I'd think must be changed is the incentive offered to the client. Only giving entries to sweepstakes is a pretty laughable reward considering how much money can be saved by using less at the very high peaks of usage. Especially in places where end user distribution is separate from transmission/ electricity generation/etc & electricity rates vary depending on real time demand. Plus, If they give good enough incentives I think a lot of people would be interested especially when the inconvenience amounts to making you use less electricity when it's at its most expensive (not a concern yet for most because of fixed rate tarification being a lot more common)
The equivalent program where I live (Los Angeles) gives you $120 for participating in your first summer, then $60 every following year. It's absolutely worth it in my book
All the fear mongering about the remote control is bizarre to me. You're warned in advance before the adjustment happens, and it's not like you're locked out of your thermostat. If you get uncomfortable just turn the temp back down. It's an easy way to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, especially since the thermostat will precool beforehand, which is typically a time when renewables are a higher proportional of the grid's supply
> All the fear mongering about the remote control is bizarre to me.
That's because you're being paid a hundred times as much. No I will not let someone else screw up my heating for a coupon. $60 a year? I'll try it and I won't feel scammed.
I think it's important to note that this is a program these people voluntarily signed up for with those terms. I agree that I probably wouldn't sign up with those terms, but they did and are acting like this was unexpected.
I want to be positive and give the benefit of the doubt, but this seems like the kind of thing that gets buried in the details and overlooked. It was just one piece of a bigger system.
Our energy company offers $20/year plus a raffle entry for each time they do it. It's pretty low, but last year they adjusted my thermostat by 4 degrees for about 4 or 5 hours, and it happened twice. The article makes it sound like the utility company is doing this every day or something. It's really not the case. So I'm not sure how much money people expect they're entitled to.
And even for customers that have time of day billing, peak times are correlated with high-cost energy production (peaking plants), but not necessarily grid instability events.
