[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.