Midwest Chick's Place

One thing about the liberal mindset is they are firmly convinced that the rules will never apply to them. And I just love to see it when they’re wrong.

Here’s the story: A woman in Colorado decides to get a $40 credit on her energy bill by allowing the energy company to control her thermostat. What could go wrong?

Yes, dear readers, you are already there, but I’ll tell the rest of the story anyway.

She decides, on a hot Colorado night, to turn her AC down from 79 degrees to 75. And is denied due to ‘strain on the power grid’. And she’s dismayed and has much consternation because how could the power company deny her the power to turn her AC down so her kid can sleep?

Baker said that while she initially enrolled in the program to offset her carbon footprint, she had not been aware that it would leave her unable to adjust her own thermostat. “It was kind of annoying. I’m doing my part to help the grid, and I’m getting penalized for it in some way,” she said.

She’s not getting penalized. She quite literally got what she signed up for.

It gets better because I looked her up. She’s an Associate Professor of Civil and Architectural Engineering at UC Boulder. Her interests?

Power Systems
Smart Grid
Renewable Energy
Building-to-Grid Optimization
Applications of Machine Learning in Energy

She’s won awards on academic papers about smart grids and power systems. And yet it never occurred to her, ever, that these smart grids and programs could actually prevent her from being about to lower her thermostat by four degrees.

This is not the fault of the energy company. Their algorithm was working as they programmed it and they didn’t, I’m sure, single her out. She got exactly what she asked for. And she thought that $40 credit every month was worth it, until it wasn’t.

If she learned anything (and that’s a big ‘if’), then she’s no longer going to get that $40 credit. I doubt she’ll take ownership of the problem though.