The Government is Coming for Your Thermostat

It’s the middle of a summer heat wave and temperatures are rising. Suddenly your air conditioning turns off. It’s not a blackout or a brownout: it’s the new government plan.

Mass government subsidies for inefficient and expensive ‘green energy’ wind turbines and solar panels combined with bans on efficient and cheap oil, coal and gas, have made energy grids unreliable and costly. States that have aimed for widespread use of green energy like California and Texas are suffering blackouts and brownouts at growing rates.

Instead of building reliable energy resources, federal and state governments, along with monopolistic energy companies, are making up for green energy with energy rationing.

Or ‘smart rationing’.

Virtual power plants were a green energy buzzword that promised to harness local battery capacity to distribute energy to the grid, but the diminishing promise of solar panels and the power hunger of electric cars has poured cold water on the idea that the ‘green’ battery devices and useless solar panels will ever reliably give more to the grid than they take from it.

Virtual power plants, like all things virtual, have come to mean power that isn’t really there. Instead virtual power plants have become another euphemism for rationing power.

Unable to get meaningful savings from so-called battery ‘distributed energy resources’, virtual power plants now mean using smart thermostats to seize control over homeowner power usage with bureaucrats or AI software deciding how much power people should be using and turning off their heat or air conditioning. Government agencies and monopolistic utilities insist on calling this ‘efficiency’ rather than what it actually is which is rationing customer power usage.

State utilities have taken to bribing consumers with discounts on skyrocket energy rates and ‘free’ smart thermostats like Google Nest in order to induce them to turn over control of their thermostats. Once they give up control, they may be allowed only limited manual overrides a month to be able to turn on the heat or air in even the most miserable weather.

Families facing summer heat and winter cold find that they’re not just wrestling with each other for control of the thermostat but with their utility company, its software and the government mandates that are out to force them to use less energy even as energy prices climb higher.

A recent Department of Energy report revealed the ambitious scope of the ‘virtual power plant’ strategy while emphasizing the rationing aspect of ‘smart thermostats’ and ‘smart water heaters’ which “can be controlled remotely” in ways that are “typically imperceptible to the owner.”

The Department of Energy report admitted that by 2020, “the U.S. will likely need to add enough new power capacity to meet over 200 GW of peak demand; were the U.S. to follow a path towards 100% clean electricity by 2035, new capacity needs could be nearly double”.

The DOE report provided no serious plan for doubling capacity, even as solar energy and wind turbines are wrecking the reliability and capability of the energy grid, except virtual power plant rationing. That’s why the federal government has been aggressively forcing VPPs at the state level through measures such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2222 to make sure everyone’s energy can be rationed.

The Department of Energy report emphasizes that “every purchase is an opportunity to enroll (or pre-enroll) a DER owner in a VPP” and then “VPP operators orchestrate DER behavior using an information technology (IT) platform that can connect to DERs at different points in the electrical chain” such as when “VPP operators signal directly to the DER—e.g., as part of its VPP platform, Google Nest can schedule adjustments to heating and cooling demand through its connected smart thermostat software.”

What all that amounts to is your air conditioning suddenly turning off during a heat wave.

VPP participation is currently voluntary, but many homeowners, especially the elderly, are not aware of what they’re agreeing to and don’t understand how their new smart thermostats work. And the voluntary side is a temporary phase to be eventually eliminated through a combination of ‘market signals’ meaning very high rates for non-participants and government mandates.

The government isn’t just coming for your car and gas stove, but your thermostat.

The literal power grab is still being aggressively marketed by the media. A recent Washington Post story offers the sales pitch headline, “Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats”. Democracy dies in darkness indeed. Literally.

Consumers are told of the benefits of a connected lifestyle where “at the U.S. offices of Octopus Energy in downtown Houston, a rack of computer servers and a team of software engineers act as the brain of a virtual power plant that reaches its tentacles into thousands of homes across Texas.” And who wouldn’t want the tentacles of an octopus reaching into their home?

While power rationing continues to be marketed as “efficiency”, the Department of Energy report reveals that behind it is a “climate imperative”and an “energy justice imperative.” The goal of green energy or clean energy was never to increase the power supply but to decrease it. Virtual power plants degenerating into rationing was not a sideline or a detour, but the whole goal.

The dirty little secret of clean energy is that there’s no such thing as clean energy. And the forces behind it know it. From the dirty strip mining for rare earth metals to the unrecyclable wind turbines and solar panels to the petroleum products used to clean them and the coal plants that provide reliable capacity when they go down, there is nothing clean or green about it.

Environmentalists don’t believe there is such a thing as clean or green energy either. Their goal is to reduce energy usage by replacing reliable energy systems with unreliable ones, and inexpensive ones with expensive ones, as a way of ‘Cloward-Pivening’ the energy grid to force energy rationing and the eventual reduction of the human population through the kind of mass deaths that occur due to the lack of air conditioning in France and fuel bills in the UK.

Energy rationing kills an estimated 50,000 people, mostly senior citizens, in the UK and has killed tens of thousands of French people during summer heat waves. Those numbers would translate into millions of deaths in the United States. And that is the next phase of rationing.

The government is coming for your thermostat because it’s coming for you.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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