And you can avoid grid failures proactively for a comparatively very small inconvenience. The only thing I'd think must be changed is the incentive offered to the client. Only giving entries to sweepstakes is a pretty laughable reward considering how much money can be saved by using less at the very high peaks of usage. Especially in places where end user distribution is separate from transmission/ electricity generation/etc & electricity rates vary depending on real time demand. Plus, If they give good enough incentives I think a lot of people would be interested especially when the inconvenience amounts to making you use less electricity when it's at its most expensive (not a concern yet for most because of fixed rate tarification being a lot more common)

The equivalent program where I live (Los Angeles) gives you $120 for participating in your first summer, then $60 every following year. It's absolutely worth it in my book

All the fear mongering about the remote control is bizarre to me. You're warned in advance before the adjustment happens, and it's not like you're locked out of your thermostat. If you get uncomfortable just turn the temp back down. It's an easy way to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, especially since the thermostat will precool beforehand, which is typically a time when renewables are a higher proportional of the grid's supply

> All the fear mongering about the remote control is bizarre to me.

That's because you're being paid a hundred times as much. No I will not let someone else screw up my heating for a coupon. $60 a year? I'll try it and I won't feel scammed.

I think it's important to note that this is a program these people voluntarily signed up for with those terms. I agree that I probably wouldn't sign up with those terms, but they did and are acting like this was unexpected.

I want to be positive and give the benefit of the doubt, but this seems like the kind of thing that gets buried in the details and overlooked. It was just one piece of a bigger system.

Our energy company offers $20/year plus a raffle entry for each time they do it. It's pretty low, but last year they adjusted my thermostat by 4 degrees for about 4 or 5 hours, and it happened twice. The article makes it sound like the utility company is doing this every day or something. It's really not the case. So I'm not sure how much money people expect they're entitled to.

Not even a coupon, a raffle ticket.

The participants also use less energy when costs are high and save on their bill, don’t they?

Maybe not. Texas hasn’t 100% caught on with time of day billing.

Here’s Austin’s utility: https://austinenergy.com/ae/rates/residential-rates/resident...

And even for customers that have time of day billing, peak times are correlated with high-cost energy production (peaking plants), but not necessarily grid instability events.

> if dry

Sounds like you are not familiar with Houston. If I had to sleep like that I’d move.

I haven't been to Houston myself, but I've visited Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Orlando and a bunch of Californian cities — one thing they had in common was that the ACs were turned way too low (in business conference centers) where I learned to bring a sweater when travelling to warm US state in the summer (not to mention the confusion when you ask for water without ice).

I keep my AC at 26C/80F when it's really hot outside (like these days when we are hitting 95F with 104F expected in a few days), and the difference when going out still bothers me. My metabolism adapts to outside conditions and I assume most people's does to (eg. towards the end of winter, 50F/10C feels nice and warm whereas at the beginning of winter, it's chilly).

But even if you are uncomfortable at 78F/25C as the article states, does one seriously worry about overheating and babies becoming dehydrated at those temps? Like really? (I've got an 8 month old and I avoid ACs but did turn them on the last few days because of the outside temps crossing 30C)

To top it off, most ACs dry out the air too (to the point that this also bothers me).

Yeah sure. Lets do the same with banks. Nobodies life changes when we withdraw 1 dollar from each person to raise 200m to fund whatever project.

Isn't that basically what we have taxes for?

They did that in Argentina a couple of times. Want 1$, though

As a result, people avoid storing large sums of money on banks in Argentina

Note that all governments will do similar things. Either by raising taxes, doing mandatory bonds, etc