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."
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."