[throwaway292893]

People are paying for the resource, they should be able to use the resource. If there's not enough resource then the supplier should not sell the resource. No need to shame people for having a preference and using something they paid for.

The hospital and nursing home bit is nice fear mongering but unless you have an instance where that has happened it's not relevant. If we neared too close to capacity due to over demand the electric companies would due controlled brown outs for residential areas. There's also backup generators at hospitals for natural disasters incase a brown out is not possible, and those would not have been prevented by rationing.

[milesvp]

I might agree with you generally, but the more I learn about power generation the harder the problem looks. A power grid requires balancing load with a higher degree of precision than you might think, and not just total sums, but also in different areas of the grid.

‘Ideally’ people would be paying spot pricing, so they’d be incentivized to ration properly. But we saw how well that worked out for the people doing that during Texas’ winter storm.

Now if everyone paid spot pricing eventually we’d have lots of smart outlets shutting off all but the most important power consumers in a house, and it wouldn’t be as big an issue to pay spot pricing, you could be asleep and know that only the refridgerator and thermostat are going to blow up your bill.

I don’t see a system like remote thermostat adjustment being an absolutely horrible solution to the general problem, when used sparingly and treated as the failure that it us, so it’s not relied on. Particularly when the alternative might be a total blackout. I’m not sure, but I suspect this might also be preferrable to rolling brownouts.