The California Energy Commission has advanced a proposal that would require the installation of thermostats that allow the government to control the temperature of homes and businesses in case of high energy prices or shortages.
The proposed regulations would require all residential and non-residential buildings to have a Programmable Communicating Thermostat (PCT).
The regulations say that thermostats will be configured with a non-removable radio communications device which can be used by utilities to send adjustment signals. For pricing events, thermostats could be offset by as much as four degrees, but customers would be able to override the offsets and thermostat settings at any time during these price events.
What is scarier is that when the unit gets a signal of an energy shortage, it will set the thermostat to a government-defined setpoint that the customer cannot reset or control.
Frightening? You bet. You can read the full text of the regulations in this PDF file.
2 comments ↓
[…] that California had been thinking of mandating government control of residential thermostats (read original article). Due to public outcry over the proposal, it has been dropped, and instead, utilities will work on […]
this is bad, people really need to see who supports these ideas, and vote them out
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