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Sounds like there could be a conflict of interest though. The power company makes more money if people use more electricity in general.
by Houshalter 13y ago
Sounds like there could be a conflict of interest though. The power company makes more money if people use more electricity in general.
- Jemaclus 13y agoWell, not necessarily. The idea being that you're planning to have it kick in at 5:00 for 10 minutes, but in order to smooth out the energy distribution levels, they push it to 5:10 instead, so you're still using your 10 minutes of AC, just at a slightly different time... That's my take on it, anyway.
- hablahaha 13y agoTrue, but sometimes there really is just not enough electricity to go around. Consider power outages due to natural disasters or even extreme load on the grid. In Texas, we have a handful of days each summer where the grid is maxed out in the mid-afternoons and ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) will come on the radio begging people to conserve their usage. This kind of product could mitigate that. There are also a lot of nuanced things that go on with utilities that influence their decisions: the electricity markets, regulations, issues at plants, industrial users, etc. Us sweating it out at our individual households don't mean a lot to them in the grand scheme of things.