True. Knowing what people have their thermostats set to (especially if those thermostats are on a preprogrammed schedule to change temps throughout the day) allows them to know what demand will be as well though, which is very useful.
Which works right up until climate change decides to dump a foot of snow on Houston and suddenly the grid is overtaxed by a factor of ten and you have no way of handling that other than half-heartedly asking people to maybe please turn their heaters down a little. This way you can go "actually we're going to set everyone's thermostats to 65 so the transformers don't fucking explode and half a million people freeze to death, wear a sweater for a few days."
True. Knowing what people have their thermostats set to (especially if those thermostats are on a preprogrammed schedule to change temps throughout the day) allows them to know what demand will be as well though, which is very useful.
They could probably do that using power meter trend data from previous years as well 😉
Which works right up until climate change decides to dump a foot of snow on Houston and suddenly the grid is overtaxed by a factor of ten and you have no way of handling that other than half-heartedly asking people to maybe please turn their heaters down a little. This way you can go "actually we're going to set everyone's thermostats to 65 so the transformers don't fucking explode and half a million people freeze to death, wear a sweater for a few days."