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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> I’m sorry, you cannot pay me $25/yr to sweat on my sofa.

I mean, if the grid goes down because everyone refuses to sweat a tiny bit during a massive heat wave's peak load, you might be sweating anyways... for longer and $25 poorer.

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The ability of the grid companies to rely on the fact that they can lower people’s electric usage centrally might prevent them from appropriately scaling up the system.

If they can smooth out peaks - if, say, a bunch of people set their thermostats to cool at 2pm so they spread that out over a 10-15 minute period, or they have some folks run AC at 2-3 and others 3-4 - they might need to also run a lot less wasteful energy production.

As with most things, there are good and bad ways to use this ability.

I would prefer if the two entities are separated though. The thermostat should come from a private company that optimizes for the weather locally and possibly takes in data from the electric company through an API so the end user has more control and the motivations for both entities stay intact.

I’d argue the cost of scaling up the grid, both economic and environmental, are too great when the problem can be resolved by raising everyone’s thermostat to 76 for a couple hours a year. Peaker plants are wildly expensive to keep in service, and usually run off of coal or oil.

And not just whether it goes down but it can save money. During summer peaks the cost of electricity to the utility on the open market can spike 10x or more. Almost all utilities have regulated profit which allows them to recover (most) costs, so shaving those peaks ultimately saves ratepayers.

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