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Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

His wife received an alert on her phone soon after that. The family said their thermostat had been changed remotely, raising the temperature of their home during a three-hour “energy saving event.”
The family’s smart thermostat was installed a few years ago as part of a new home security package. Many smart thermostats can be enrolled in a program called "Smart Savers Texas." It's operated by a company called EnergyHub.

The agreement states that in exchange for an entry into sweepstakes, electric customers allow them to control their thermostats during periods of high energy demand.

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Calling this "Shock" seems like some serious FUD. They signed up for this program, they got an alert at the time, and they were able to un-enroll after realizing the deal wasn't a good fit for them.

There is absolutely nothing "sinister" about this. They literally enrolled in a program to allow exactly this behavior.

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In fact, this is a wonderful program. If you adjust all the thermostats 1 or 2K above for a relatively short period of time you can have massive savings at scale while not fundamentally change the quality of life of the people[0]. 26°C for a short period of time is not something terrible either (if dry), this is what I have right now.

Basically, the inverse of the tragedy of the commons.

[0]: and they can even un-enroll... so the company is really doing it the right way.

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.

Not even a coupon, a raffle ticket.

The participants also use less energy when costs are high and save on their bill, don’t they?

Maybe not. Texas hasn’t 100% caught on with time of day billing.

Here’s Austin’s utility: https://austinenergy.com/ae/rates/residential-rates/resident...

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.

> if dry

Sounds like you are not familiar with Houston. If I had to sleep like that I’d move.

I haven't been to Houston myself, but I've visited Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Orlando and a bunch of Californian cities — one thing they had in common was that the ACs were turned way too low (in business conference centers) where I learned to bring a sweater when travelling to warm US state in the summer (not to mention the confusion when you ask for water without ice).

I keep my AC at 26C/80F when it's really hot outside (like these days when we are hitting 95F with 104F expected in a few days), and the difference when going out still bothers me. My metabolism adapts to outside conditions and I assume most people's does to (eg. towards the end of winter, 50F/10C feels nice and warm whereas at the beginning of winter, it's chilly).

But even if you are uncomfortable at 78F/25C as the article states, does one seriously worry about overheating and babies becoming dehydrated at those temps? Like really? (I've got an 8 month old and I avoid ACs but did turn them on the last few days because of the outside temps crossing 30C)

To top it off, most ACs dry out the air too (to the point that this also bothers me).

Yeah sure. Lets do the same with banks. Nobodies life changes when we withdraw 1 dollar from each person to raise 200m to fund whatever project.

Isn't that basically what we have taxes for?

They did that in Argentina a couple of times. Want 1$, though

As a result, people avoid storing large sums of money on banks in Argentina

Note that all governments will do similar things. Either by raising taxes, doing mandatory bonds, etc

Agreed. For all the problems with ERCOT, Texas does have an astoundingly high penetration of renewable sources that makes programs like this extremely useful. High renewable penetration causes grid stability issues, but not for the reasons you would think.

Electricity travels at the speed of light, so there's a huge dependency on spinning generator inertia to keep a stable supply. With renewables, this "grid inertia" is greatly reduced.

The reduction in grid inertia makes quick demand reduction important. It takes most generation sources several seconds to "spin up" and support load transients. Loads on the other hand can be cut within a few hundred milliseconds. HVAC is nearly ideal for load cuts because they use a ton of power and small variations in temperature can be absorbed by thermal inertia of buildings and product being cooled.

There's a great document on this and how it affects the Texas grid. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/73856.pdf

People that willingly sign up for these programs then complain about it is a classic "leapords ate my face" scenario. The same thing happened to users of Griddy during the huge grid failure earlier this year. Griddy exposed users to realtime spot energy pricing which pegs at $9000/mwh when there's more demand than available generation.

A side note, ironically the same document praising ERCOT's innovative handling of renewable sources says the US national east/west grids are unlikely to face the same problems until the 2040's. Basically, if Texas grid was connected to one of the national ones, these problems they're trying to solve with innovation would just go away for at least 20 years.

>> trying to solve with innovation would just go away for at least 20 years.

Interesting! But wait... wouldn't that mean everyone would save effort and potentially money by hooking up to the national grid? One that has way more people working on innovation + a 20 year time line for it?

Honestly that sounds way more simple, straightforward, and literally more innovative than "let's just all turn our temps down when peaking" lol.

Then again Texas politics... :-|

Most people aren't reading terms and conditions. There is an expectation that when you buy a thermostat and install it, you will get to control it without outside interference. People shouldn't have to read fine print in order for the things they buy to meet the most basic of expectations. I wouldn't call it nefarious, but I would say this kind of thing is a dark pattern, meant to take advantage of end users' ignorance.

Maybe if this kind of thing happens a few more times people will start to realize there are some major downsides to smart devices, including losing control of your own belongings.

Here are the terms and conditions.[1]

Nest resells this program, without saying up front that it's about adjusting your thermostat for their advantage.[2]

The site will not work in private browsing mode - you get "Cookies are blocked. To continue, change your browser settings to allow third-party cookies and try again." Why it needs third party cookies is not clear. It's so Google.

What Nest tells users is this:

A Nest thermostat can help you use less energy by cooling your home in summer or heating your home in winter ahead of time and tweaking the temperature up to four degrees during the rush hour. You’re in control. If you’re home, Nest won’t let the temperature become uncomfortable. You can change the temperature at any time.

The Nest site does show terms under Legal. No mention of "Nest won't let the temperature become uncomfortable" there, of course. [3]

"Under the program, your Utility notifies Google of the existence of a Rush Hour Rewards event, causing Google’s servers to remotely inform your Google Nest thermostat (“Nest Thermostat”) to automatically change the temperature setpoint in your home on that day, without any manual intervention by you."

[1] https://my.radiothermostat.com/rtcoa/terms/ercot/rtcoa-ercot...

[2] https://nest.com/energy-partners/texas/

[3] https://nest.com/legal/energy-partner/texas/

They had it installed as part of a home security package and guessing from their thermostat(which appears to be a GoControl Z-Wave thermostat), it was with Vivint. That dark patterns ship has sailed long ago.

They probably weren't aware of what they signed up for -- someone hid the details in the terms and conditions, which no one read. Because no one ever does.

If that was the case, it's on the article / journalist to actually uncover and present that information.

Beyond that, the article says they got an alert when it happened and later decided to un-enroll from the program, so I really don't see any grounds to assume bad-faith on the part of the people running it.

This isn't true, the email they send is very clear that it's a sweepstakes based on enrolling in a program to raise your temperature during high heat momemts to help your fellow Texans to avoid brownouts.

In fact, the email begins by explaining how many heat deaths there are, how power outages affect vulnerable populations, and how if everyone could raise their temperatures 3 degrees during critical events we could avoid all of that.

And then a clear call to action to participate.

The problem is that they were sent an SMS. Without it, few would have noticed.

The SMS should be reserved for turning the system off completely, not for minor changes.

Having your thermostat monitored by some random tech company does feel a tad sinister to me. Are they selling the data to ad companies?

It's a Nest thermostat. Google is already doing something with that data. Sounds like this is just a second entity having your usage data. Actually since Google already has it, this company is probably the 200th entity having your usage data.

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