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Comment by pope_meat | Hacker News Reader

Personally I hope ecological collapse nips this black mirror future were tumbling in to.

Things feel bleak.

If anything, ecological collapse might hasten this future.

Just last week, there was this news about the Texas power company that remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power and avoid brownouts/blackouts. This predictably caused public outrage as people discovered what was in the fine print that they signed without reading, but from the perspective of the power company, everything worked as intended, so I absolutely expect to push these remote-controllable thermostats even harder moving forward.

Managing an integrated grid using household solar and battery as part of the supply management is one thing.

Adjusting people's usage for demand management is another.

They need to be separated and managed differently.

Instead of push adjusting HVAC for demand, they could use proper price signals with the appropriate local automation at the household that can be over-ridden by the consumer.

I agree price signals and local automation are the way to go. I would love to have my HVAC run according to the true cost of electricity, also minimizing CO2 emissions.

BUT giving the grid operators emergency control over demand is a useful tool when the grid is close to failure. Too many people will just hit override unless the price signals are very high. When grid operators know people will die if their system goes down and it’s on the brink, people choosing to be 4 degrees cooler is such an immoral choice I’m OK removing that choice from them.

Also very helpful to reduce shocks to the system after any outages by temporarily limiting HVAC restarts.

> Too many people will just hit override unless the price signals are very high.

But that's the point of an energy market, it will adapt the price signal to the supply and the demand. People will override it without thinking only the first time. The second time they will remember the humongous bill they got because of that and will think twice.

>remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power

why would raising temperatures save power? probably a silly question but I'm confused.

because air conditioning runs less.

Raising the temperature the thermostat is set to maintain the house at, thus less power is used to cool it in a hot environment.

Raising the temperature during a heat wave is the same as increasing the threshold where the ac unit kicks in. So instead of all these ac units clicking on to cool off houses at any temp above 70 degrees, the ac units click on at 80 degrees. That change saves a ton of energy.

One of the things I do during the year is set the AC according to the outside temperature. During the winter months, my house is set to 70 degrees. As the average outside temperature rises, I increase it by 2 degrees for every 10 from 60. So when it's 100 degrees outside, it's 78 indoors. I have an older unit and watched in horror last year as it struggled and failed to cope with 110 degree temperatures.... I basically just gave up, shut it down, and waited until night time to turn it back on.

It was presumably the upper threshold before air conditioning came on.

Explanation for those wondering why this needed explanation: Most thermostats set the lower threshold before heating comes on, so turning it up would use more energy.

thanks to you and everyone for the explanation - I haven't lived in the U.S for 20+ years now so I forgot all about air conditioning.

I was counting that as an example of a tech done well! CA does this too, but afaik, it is advertised as such when one signs up for a free Smart meter and there is even a slightly better rate offered.

I just don’t see an alternate way to implement this. Prompting users via pricing is not something that will quick enough or intuitive enough. Also the sacrifice they are asked to make is at most a few degrees

>I just don’t see an alternate way to implement this.

Increase capacity.

By running the system ever closer to the bone you simply cause more disasters.

We are all underestimating the level of fluctuation in energy requirement caused by a slight weather change. If the system were to have capacity comparable to max possible usage, the rates would be sky high. This is not like storing water and even that we can’t store beyond a certain point. See what happens with flood and drought patterns. The power company will sell it to someone cheap, we just don’t store it

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/03/14/The-last-episode-of-...

These programs are opt-in and normally come with incentives like a $75 gift card or a free thermostat.

It's possible that people are using thermostats that are still provisioned to the previous tenets electrical bill.

It's a important technological achievement to be able to shift and schedule loads so that we can switch to more efficient energy sources. Requiring the power generation companies to service the upper percentage of usage is a lot of expensive environmentally as well as economically.

Ecological collapse will likely tumble us more into a black mirror future as populations become increasingly dependent on technology to fulfill their needs.

Said every generation ever.

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