California wants to control home thermostats

California wants to control home thermostats
By Felicity Barringer Published: January 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO: The conceit in the 1960s show "The Outer Limits" was that outside forces had taken control of your television set.

Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.

The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators.

The changes would allow utilities to adjust customers' preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring. Customers could override the utilities' suggested temperatures. But in emergencies, the utilities could override customers' wishes.

Final approval is expected next month.

Today in Americas
This year, Clinton is off the stage and on the streets in NevadaRepublican candidates spar in South Carolina debateHow did pollsters and the media get New Hampshire wrong?"You realize there are times - very rarely, once every few years - when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don't want to do that," said Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission.

Reducing individual customers' electrical use - if necessary, involuntarily - could avoid that, Rosenfeld said. "If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain," he said, "there's a lot less pain to go around."

While the proposals have received little attention in California, the Internet and talk radio are abuzz with indignation at the idea.

The radio-controlled thermostat is not a new technology, though it is constantly being tweaked; the latest iterations were on display this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Pacific Gas and Electric, the major utility in Northern California, already has a pilot program in Stockton that allows customers to choose to have their air-conditioning systems attached to a radio-controlled device to reduce use during periods when electricity rates are at their peak. But the idea that a government would mandate use of these devices and reserve the power to override a building owner's wishes galls some people.

"This is an outrage," one Californian said in an e-mail message to Rosenfeld. "We need to build new facilities to handle the growth in this state, not become Big Brother to the citizens of California."

The broader stir on the Internet began when Joseph Somsel, a San Jose-based contributor to the publication American Thinker, wrote an article a week ago on the programmable communicating thermostat, or PCT. Somsel went after the proposal with arguments that were by turns populist ("Come the next heat wave, the elites might be comfortably lolling in La Jolla's ocean breezes" while "the Central Valley's poor peons are baking in Bakersfield"), free-market ("PCTs will obscure the price signals to power plant developers") and civil libertarian ("the new PCT requirement certainly seems to violate the 'a man's home is his castle' common-law dictum"). Word of the California proposal hit the outrage button in corners of the Internet, was written about in The North County Times in Southern California, and got a derisive mention on Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh's radio program. The fact that similar radio-controlled technologies have been used on a voluntary basis in irrigation systems on farm fields and golf courses and in limited programs for buildings on Long Island is seldom mentioned in Internet postings that make liberal use of references to George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and Big Brother, the omnipresent voice of Orwell's police state. Ralph Cavanagh, an energy expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview that at a time of peak electricity use, "most people given a choice of 2 degrees of temperature setback and 14th-century living would happily embrace this capacity." Somsel, in an interview on Thursday, said he had done further research and was concerned that the radio signal - or the Internet instructions that would be sent, in an emergency, from utilities' central control stations to the broadcasters sending the FM signal - could be hacked into. That is not possible, said Nicole Tam, a spokeswoman for PG&E who works with the pilot program in Stockton. Radio pages "are encrypted and encoded," Tam said.

How is that fundamentally different from the current system? Right now, when there isn't enough power, CA cuts off all power to some segments (FL has done that, too). Reducing consumption across a broad segment seems like a superior alternative to eliminating consumption by narrower segments. As it stands, nobody has the right to unlimmited services, since any service can be simply shut off. However, shutting off power to certain segments at certain times poses a survival risk, so leveling the impact seems like a reasonable idea.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

. . . poses a survival risk . . .

---

Which could, in extreme circumstances, led eventually to anarchy.

Why not put some kind of cap on the amount of electricity people use?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nightwalker83

Why not put some kind of cap on the amount of electricity people use?

---

Better yet, charge them a higher rate if use more a certain amount of electricity sort of like a luxury tax.

Wouldn't a better solution be to build more power stations?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SurfDemon

Wouldn't a better solution be to build more power stations?

---

Better from what perspective? More revenue for the power companies, certainly, but has there been a major power plant constructed in the last three decades without opposition? NOBODY wants either a nuke, natural gas, or coal plant built within sight, smell, etc. of their house. New hydro projects are unlikely in the US, and plenty of people oppose offshore wind development (only rich folks along our coasts, and they squawk with dollars, which is very effective around here). What does that leave for power options? A tough fight to build any plant except some serious solar in the southwest connected by DC lines to other parts of the country.

So if you options for new plants are be totally original, fight like hell to maybe get a conventional plant built, or reduce consumption....well, nobody does the first one, the second one is very expensive, so the third one looks better.

CA already has higher costs when electricity is used during peak hours (business hours actually) and also has a voluntary program you can opt into that allows the electric company to install a controller on your central air unit that can turn off the system to help reduce the drain on power needed. In return they give you a rebate or discount (cant remember which) for allowing them to control your cooling system.

The problem is that population growth has by far outgrown the current infrastructure and powergrid in LA. Its so old that during the summers we get power outtages due to transformers on the power poles blowing out because they cant handle the strain on the peak demands. its a slow process to upgrade the system so the delivery mechanism can handle the current loads. Then they still need to upgrade and increase the power generating plants so they can feed the delivery system after its upgraded.

There are just way too many damn people living in the major cities in CA. Anywhere you go is like being at disneyland; having to wait in lines to do anything, traffic or more accuratley - gridlock, property taxes way to high, cost of living too high etc. CA is not that great of a place to live, dont believe the hype! :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SurfDemon

Wouldn't a better solution be to build more power stations?

---

Good lord man! The environmentalist tree-huggers would have your head! Don't you know we're killing mother Earth? She's sick man!! Can't you hear her crying? Shh.. quiet. Did you hear her? No? Wait... did you hear that time? No, really, listen really hard this time...

:) No problem. We'll build some more nuclear stations up here and ship the elctricity down (at present I believe B.C. is already supplying a chunk of power to California).

In fairness, it's one thing to remove dependency on foreign oil (apart from the good wholesome Canadian oil of course :) ), but quite another to suggest that we remove dependency on electricity. Who's going to charge up all these funky new electric vehicles that'll save the environment!

And then we will definately have to upgrade the electricity infrastructure to handle the increase in people charging their cars. :rolleyes:

Loads of capacitors so that filling your car takes about 30 seconds, that's what we need! Then put 480V plugs on the cars and at the "pumps", so that whenever anybody gets it wrong the whole city knows about it.

The government deciding when I can get heating/cooling sounds like a police state to me.

The government rotating power outages sounds like mismanagement.

I don't think either option is acceptable.

Brownouts are required in order to keep the system from overloading and blowing transformers. When you see them blow up on the power poles you have to face reality.

Get a new govt. or buy some power from oversea's - like Canada.

Wont matter as the deliveery system is antique.

Actually, there are all kinds of things going on here, not the least of which is Foxer suggesting that Canada is "overseas". Which sea is that? I realize that this state is in the way, but we're a desert, not an ocean, unless you turn that phrase from the America song inside out (is that reference obscure enough?).

Brownouts, rolling blackouts, or some kind of regulated cap is going to happen so long as demand outstrips supply. Adding to the supply side of the equation is problematic, and obviously, mandating demand reduction is problematic, as well. Unfortunately, there isn't a third option. Since some people hate each of the two options, who do you want to offend most?

Offend them both by telling them to go green! :D

Sure, give me another reason why I'm glad I turned down that job in CA...

For short ( < 12 hours) blackouts all you really need are one of these to keep your beer cold:

http://www.willeyville.com/temp/PM0497000_400.jpg

http://www.bowerspower.com/images/25000lg.jpg

Runs on natural gas - powered by an inline 4 -cylinder Ford engine!

And it will run your whole house with everything on!

http://www.bowerspower.com/coleman_powermate_25kW.html

I really need to get a UPS first but so far on any of the says last summer that we had heat waves, I couldnt work on my systems as it was just too hot so I shut them down anyways. :D

For a few million bucks I can get you one of these chappies......

http://www.orbitalenergy.com/gtsrr.htm

Power for 10,000 houses or so*.

* assuming average house consumption of a couple of kilowatts.

So about how loud are jet engines? I notice they never mention this on their site.

Have you ever heard an aeroplane (from outside)? Most use Jet engines.. and you really don't want one of those too near your house!

By the way, those were made just a few miles away from my house. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nemaroller

So about how loud are jet engines? I notice they never mention this on their site.

---

Very..... :)

Actually, we have little 2MW engines that are probably only as loud as a large diesel engine - still loud, but not too bad once they are inside a building, but the Olympus pictured can only be tested in pre-approved industrial areas. You need to be wearing ear defenders anywhere within a couple of hundred feet of it. You'll certainly hear it up to a mile away. But it's a lot of fun. :)

... Oh, and if you want another indication as to how loud those Olympus engines are, they are the same engines that were on Concorde...... so, you can imagine what they sound like at full thrust... :)

Sorry there's a lot of smileys in this post.... but man I love playing with jet engines...