Big Brother To Now Control Home Thermostats By Remote
Herald Tribune:
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 thepower 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.
“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.
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.”
Except, asshole, these are NOT our only 2 options. We can build more power plants. Wake up and smell the capitalism, jerk.
January 12th, 2008 at 7:55 amNo doubt someone will invent or is already inventing a jammer to fook this idea all to shit.
CA land of the? Free? Nah…Not anymore. Se Habla Espano? Si? Then bite me CA. What that state needs is a nice, massive earthquake. And I understand the next big one will make the 1906 earthquake look pale in comparison?
Looking forward to it.
January 12th, 2008 at 8:21 amNo surprise on this, California is the Land of Fruits and Nuts! Recent examples, no lead ammo for shooting animals in the Condor Range (the lead bullet fragments might damage the 180 California Condors)…YET Feinstein and Boxer have legislated the MASS MURDER of all Elk and Deer on Santa Rosa Island..gee they are non native species. 38 STATES have MUST ISSUE Concealed Carry Permits…NOT SO in Kalifornia…where Arnold has BANNED .50 Cals and SIGNED the Handgun Elimination Bill AKA Microstamp law. TEXAS her I come…it is time to ABANDON Kalifornia to the Fruits, Nuts and Illegals.
January 12th, 2008 at 10:50 amI think that they already do this or something similiar in federal buildings and schools here in NC. I remember going into one of the elementary schools and it being really cold and one of the teachers commented that they had no control over the thermostat it was control from the school district headquarters in the county. I am just going on what she told me.
Concerning people willingly turning their thermostats down. I am not sure they would. Case in point the because of the drought here in NC several restrictions have been placed on water usage one of them being no watering lawns. But you still have people watering their lawns at night trying to get away with it.
January 12th, 2008 at 10:51 am@Cathy-
I remember going into one of the elementary schools and it being really cold and one of the teachers commented that they had no control over the thermostat it was control from the school district headquarters in the county.
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I’ll just bet the district headquarters building was nice and toasty inside …
Gotta keep ALL those secretaries, assistants,and paper-pushers warm and happy.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:01 amCalifornia leads the nation in submitting to socialist command and control. It is a write off, goner, loser state. The media has been complicit with its full court press of the past 40 years to brainwash viewers with socialist ideology. I have lived here for over 20 years, and I still feel like a stranger. When I am here, I don’t feel like I am in America. Really.
January 12th, 2008 at 12:10 pmAnd I will say it again, I am so SICK of “environementalists” with their assumed moral superiority. They are the cause of most of the decline in the USA for the past 30 years. I heard one on the radio last night proudly boasting that 43 coal fired power plants have been denied to be permitted in the last few years, and saying we should be licensing wind and solar powered-power plants. Oh, and what about when the wind isn’t blowing….?
January 12th, 2008 at 12:14 pmSpread the pain? Friggin Communist bastards.
January 12th, 2008 at 5:37 pm@ Lamplighter-
California leads the nation in submitting to socialist command and control. It is a write off, goner, loser state.
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We’re not all write off losers in Mexifornia, more than just a few of us don’t agree with what our imbecilic government does. But very often we have no choice in the matter, when we vote for something that is right we are judicially shut down by our crazed, moronic Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. But believe me when I tell you there are many of us that are ready to fight when the time is right.
January 12th, 2008 at 6:03 pmJam it? LOL! It’s a freaking thermostat. It has 5 wires. They travel through the walls. Bypass it after their unit. Home Depot has books on Do-It-Yourself wiring.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:08 pm