I don't know how many folks know but Tuesday Denver took control of thermostats and locked people out from turning on their A/C.
Many energy companies will give you a discount if you allow for small period of time where they can keep your heat or a/c from turning on due to demand. But you could always override but in this case the temperatures were "locked".
I know I haven't opted into Eco+ or any energy company plan but in the back of my mind they can always override that using emergency powers. It's good to know if they do lock your thermostat you can always manually call for heat or cooling. Make a small jumper wire and place the jumper across the two terminal, R & W for heat, R & Y for cooling.
I would never join one of these programs, especially for a one-time $25 like our utility does. The only time they are going to turn you off is when you really need the heat or cooling the most.
Besides that, it isn't up to them how warm or cool I want my house, I pay them to give me electricity, not for them to tell me how to use it.
I could say more, but that might change this into a political argument...
Even though I use the Ecobee thermostat system (just too convenient and basically got it for 80% off from my utility co.) though cloud based integration, I can still control it as a dumb thermostat if the cloud goes down. I did not sign up for any of the minuscule additional discounts offered for opting into their Echo+ program with my power company. Will never expose myself to that (there are many articles about how messed up exposing your system to their control can be). Unlike some have reported here, I have generally have not had any problems with the integration (primarily due to the Ecobee side going down IIRC) in the two years I have been using it (knock on wood)!
Many Utilities across the country argued and justified the consumer bearing the cost to switch the meter infrastructure over to Smart Meters. One of the big selling points was "Peak/Off-Peak rate" billing that would come from them now knowing EXACTLY when you were burning your kilowatts.
Anybody seen that come as promised with those meters?
In wholesale electricity markets Off-Peak is regularly less than HALF the peak demand daytime rates. Perfect for the residential market to load shift all sorts of high wattage consumption to night hours and save megabucks over the course of a year.
Nope, I haven't seen it. But those utilities sure did convince local regulators that this was gonna be the kneesbees for consumers.
The biggest impact is on their bottom line from reducing meter reader labor & transportation costs. Meanwhile they haven't stopped asking for rate hikes across the country.
Edit add: Thinking about the smart metering (and smart billing) in the context of the OP whereby a utility is FINE shutting your AC down to shave off load to meet their capacity constraints.... because they are getting a PRETTY PENNY for every kilowatt during those peak hours!
But ask them to get their billing aligned with time-of-day usage so that YOU and YOUR NEIGHBORS would be incentivized to shift as much as possible to the night ....and they aren't in any big hurry to do that.
Why? Well perhaps it's because THEY GENERALLY LIKE being "near capacity" at top dollar Peak rates ....and exceeding capacity is only a concern to them during the summer when they may have to buy more on the open market OR when the regulator starts asking them to build new generation if they can't provide the service demanded. All the rest of the year they'd rather not have you load shift to the cheaper Off Peak rate time.
Total conjecture on my part.
This is just a variation of what happened in my water district.
Due to the drought, everyone had to cut down on residential water usage. This of course (resource conservation that is) makes complete sense until you understand that the vast majority of water is used by agriculture here in this state and a disproportionate amount is used for crops like almonds which are exported. IIRC, less than 15-20% of water use is for residential and non-agricultural commercial use. At any rate, in my home, we cut down on water usage around 30% meeting and exceeding the state and local guideline/goal of 25%. However, our water bill went up significantly because quote “the infrastructure still has fixed costs to deliver your water so you must be charged more per unit of water to maintain the pipes even though you are using far less water.”
Getting back to the topic of smart homes and smart meters, one of the rationales given to the city council for allowing a rate increase was to fund the installation of smart water meters in order to make measurement more efficient, thus saving on personnel costs, etc. IOW, to supposedly decrease the cost of providing water. This obviously did not happen. As a matter of fact, our dept of water and power ended up having to settle with several customers who had been erroneously billed thousands of dollars per month (every month for multiple months) more for their water and power due to problems with the meters, or at least in their handling of the data.
Technology can be fantastic in the right hands (meaning locally, LOL). We should consider Hubitat and local implementation “one of the good guys”. Rant over.
I'd rather have an energy company turn down a thermostat than cut off my supply altogether for 4 hours a day to ration it. Neither are ideal but if you don't have cloud-mediated thermostats the companies still have their big levers
I am curious what thermostats exactly would not allow the consumer to change them? I went to the site of the energy company to check the terms on their program but I think they might buried in the sign up process and not exposed. I also saw they had some thermostats replacement options from them, so wondering if it is specialized devices they can lock out.
Anyway... reason I am wondering is I have a Nest 3rd Gen and I just setup the new "Google Nest" stat for someone else. When it asks you about the savings programs it assures you that you can "ALWAYS" override it if you want. I would imagine it is built into the firmware to always allow the user to adjust manually. Has anyone heard of Nest getting totally locked out by the utility?
My utility does not have any incentive program, only a "Seasonal Savings" where it can tweak your schedule to try and help you save money. I usually let it do its thing and make adjustments later. With the Nest 3rd Gen and learning mode enabled it is always changing the schedule anyway. I usually review it at the start of the season and clean up and then let it do its thing as we manually adjust occasionally.
I'd be happy to sign up for such a program under the right conditions. These people were paid to be the first to have their supply constrained. One can argue that the price was too low. Utilities use these programs to minimize brown-outs, which are generally worse than constraining people who agreed to be constrained.
We, especially those of us in the USA, are used to living in an age of energy abundance where constraints have been rare. The era of low-cost fixed-price energy seems to be over for at least a while. Anyone who believes transitioning away from current sources to different sources will be cheap is at least a little high on hopium. And unfortunately the people in Europe are going to feel the costs hardest, first this winter.
People will do stupid things if they think it will get them a few bucks. Giving control of your thermostat to a company is kinda nuts. But then so is putting a piece of spyware in your cars OBD port that can track your cars exact location and speed, to try and save a few bucks on your car insurance.
My electric company will send me a text message if they want me to cut back on my electricity (usually wayyy back)- usually for a few hours. If I do it, I can see a discount on my bill. So far it seems they only test it- once or maybe twice in the summer. I'm totally OK with this system.
For commercial customers many utilities offer demand-response programs where they ask companies to run on standby power during periods of peak load. They pay you to be in the program and they pay you when you switch to standby power. The incentives are generally sufficient to more than pay for itself. That kind of voluntary program where there's an actual incentive might be something I would sign up for as a residential user.
One thing I was thinking of is that I purchase my electric from a different supplier than the delivery company. It's one of the advantages I had because I locked in 1.5 years of electric at a decent rate. If ComEd decided to enable demand based controls I wonder if they would do this based on address and supplier or just assume the "collective" use of the grid.
I would assume supplier wouldn't matter and they would go with the path of easiest way to implement which would be the "collective good".
