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It’s the middle of a summer heat wave and temperatures are rising. Suddenly your air conditioning turns off. It’s not a blackout or a brownout: it’s the new government plan.
Mass government subsidies for inefficient and expensive ‘green energy’ wind turbines and solar panels combined with bans on efficient and cheap oil, coal and gas, have made energy grids unreliable and costly. States that have aimed for widespread use of green energy like California and Texas are suffering blackouts and brownouts at growing rates.
Instead of building reliable energy resources, federal and state governments, along with monopolistic energy companies, are making up for green energy with energy rationing.
Or ‘smart rationing’.
Virtual power plants were a green energy buzzword that promised to harness local battery capacity to distribute energy to the grid, but the diminishing promise of solar panels and the power hunger of electric cars has poured cold water on the idea that the ‘green’ battery devices and useless solar panels will ever reliably give more to the grid than they take from it.
Virtual power plants, like all things virtual, have come to mean power that isn’t really there. Instead virtual power plants have become another euphemism for rationing power.
Unable to get meaningful savings from so-called battery ‘distributed energy resources’, virtual power plants now mean using smart thermostats to seize control over homeowner power usage with bureaucrats or AI software deciding how much power people should be using and turning off their heat or air conditioning. Government agencies and monopolistic utilities insist on calling this ‘efficiency’ rather than what it actually is which is rationing customer power usage.
State utilities have taken to bribing consumers with discounts on skyrocket energy rates and ‘free’ smart thermostats like Google Nest in order to induce them to turn over control of their thermostats. Once they give up control, they may be allowed only limited manual overrides a month to be able to turn on the heat or air in even the most miserable weather.
Families facing summer heat and winter cold find that they’re not just wrestling with each other for control of the thermostat but with their utility company, its software and the government mandates that are out to force them to use less energy even as energy prices climb higher.
A recent Department of Energy report revealed the ambitious scope of the ‘virtual power plant’ strategy while emphasizing the rationing aspect of ‘smart thermostats’ and ‘smart water heaters’ which “can be controlled remotely” in ways that are “typically imperceptible to the owner.”
The Department of Energy report admitted that by 2020, “the U.S. will likely need to add enough new power capacity to meet over 200 GW of peak demand; were the U.S. to follow a path towards 100% clean electricity by 2035, new capacity needs could be nearly double”.
The DOE report provided no serious plan for doubling capacity, even as solar energy and wind turbines are wrecking the reliability and capability of the energy grid, except virtual power plant rationing. That’s why the federal government has been aggressively forcing VPPs at the state level through measures such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2222 to make sure everyone’s energy can be rationed.
The Department of Energy report emphasizes that “every purchase is an opportunity to enroll (or pre-enroll) a DER owner in a VPP” and then “VPP operators orchestrate DER behavior using an information technology (IT) platform that can connect to DERs at different points in the electrical chain” such as when “VPP operators signal directly to the DER—e.g., as part of its VPP platform, Google Nest can schedule adjustments to heating and cooling demand through its connected smart thermostat software.”
What all that amounts to is your air conditioning suddenly turning off during a heat wave.
VPP participation is currently voluntary, but many homeowners, especially the elderly, are not aware of what they’re agreeing to and don’t understand how their new smart thermostats work. And the voluntary side is a temporary phase to be eventually eliminated through a combination of ‘market signals’ meaning very high rates for non-participants and government mandates.
The government isn’t just coming for your car and gas stove, but your thermostat.
The literal power grab is still being aggressively marketed by the media. A recent Washington Post story offers the sales pitch headline, “Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats”. Democracy dies in darkness indeed. Literally.
Consumers are told of the benefits of a connected lifestyle where “at the U.S. offices of Octopus Energy in downtown Houston, a rack of computer servers and a team of software engineers act as the brain of a virtual power plant that reaches its tentacles into thousands of homes across Texas.” And who wouldn’t want the tentacles of an octopus reaching into their home?
While power rationing continues to be marketed as “efficiency”, the Department of Energy report reveals that behind it is a “climate imperative”and an “energy justice imperative.” The goal of green energy or clean energy was never to increase the power supply but to decrease it. Virtual power plants degenerating into rationing was not a sideline or a detour, but the whole goal.
The dirty little secret of clean energy is that there’s no such thing as clean energy. And the forces behind it know it. From the dirty strip mining for rare earth metals to the unrecyclable wind turbines and solar panels to the petroleum products used to clean them and the coal plants that provide reliable capacity when they go down, there is nothing clean or green about it.
Environmentalists don’t believe there is such a thing as clean or green energy either. Their goal is to reduce energy usage by replacing reliable energy systems with unreliable ones, and inexpensive ones with expensive ones, as a way of ‘Cloward-Pivening’ the energy grid to force energy rationing and the eventual reduction of the human population through the kind of mass deaths that occur due to the lack of air conditioning in France and fuel bills in the UK.
Energy rationing kills an estimated 50,000 people, mostly senior citizens, in the UK and has killed tens of thousands of French people during summer heat waves. Those numbers would translate into millions of deaths in the United States. And that is the next phase of rationing.
The government is coming for your thermostat because it’s coming for you.
Yeah, I’ve been worrying about that. Thanks Daniel !!!!!
Lay down and sweat through the hot summer afternoons, waiting for the evening cool.
Pile an extra zero degree sleeping bag on top during the winter.
They seem blissfully unaware that charging batteries consumes energy in itself.
Not ignorance, but deceitful intentionality.
There are not “unaware”. They know damn well, and they don’t care. It’s just like Dems to issue dumbass policies and then measures to control the usage of electricity and fuel because of the blackouts.
I had to explain to my elderly mother how miserable she would be if she agreed to the power company’s offer 17 years ago. She was in the early stages of alzeheimer’s and it was rough, and my lefty sister told my mom I was being paranoid, which didn’t help at all.
Twelve years ago, my mother was in a nursing home, with an independent thermostat in each room. She kept her room very warm.
If power companies want a showdown over this issue, let the nursing home industry step forward and agree to hire the extra workforce it would need to keep the residents comfortable, and explain why its already expensive rates would need to jump another 30% to pay all that additional workforce.
The Government is coming for your Everything….you will own nothing and be happy.
A look into the W.E.F.
Let’s quote Kommiela: Everyone needs to end up in the same place. [Except her.]
Of his one thing I am quite certain: she and I will spend eternity in different places. I do NOT envy her in he slightest……
No matter who we are, we all end up in the same place. Dead.
One thing for absolute sure is if the government controlled your heat
and air conditioner – there would be a cabal of elites who would have
all the heat and AC they desired. While the common people and their
kids were dying horrible deaths from extreme heat and extreme cold.
This is already happening in other ways. Martha’s Vineyard’s response to a few dozen immigrants was a classic “crystal moment” when the lies and hypocrisy were exposed. Meanwhile, we are paying for the hostile invasion and destruction of our nation, which will be plundered and handed over to the invaders, so long as they serve their globalist masters.
Welcome to the world of socialism
A line attributed to Klaus Schwab, a leading bureaucrat in the new world order of marxism – – > you will have nothing and like it
No money
No electricity
No fuel for your car – only an electric car & when you plug it in to recharge, the electric meter turns off as you’ve used too much electricity today.
etc.
But I have a few good bicycles, plenty of spare tyres, shift cables, spokes.. I WILL be mobile no matter what they do. I have in the past made many long rips on my bike… two hundred miles and more in one day. More than one such in a row.
They will have to establish checkpoints, “papahs pweeeeze” checkpoints, etc. But even those.. a 23 pound road bike can be hefted up on one’s shoulders and carried, though somewhat uncomfortably, for some distance.. surely enough to evade the checkpoints.
Buy gold/silver and emergency food. The government and their Klaus Schwab toadies can’t take that from you.
A letter from the soon to be The Bureau of Energy Use Conservation:
“Dear citizen , The Bureau of Energy Use Conservation has reviewed your record and has determined you have exceeded your allotted overall energy consumption for the year and we have no other choice but to disable your automobile and turn off your electricity for 3 months starting immediately. You have the right to contest this action if you believe that our records are wrong by calling our call center at 1-800-EatShit and begin the process. Please be aware that because of high call volume wait times can exceed 6 months. “
World population is going to peak 2064 or 2100 depending on projection.. Liberals, Democrats and leftists want to give mother nature a little help.
As time goes on more and more of those people will be “brown”. I thought all good leftists cared oh so much about them?
www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/the-world-population-in-2100-by-country/
We cut off all the Electricity and Water to the District of Crooks and Useless Nations sounds fair to me
Never, ever vote for a Democrat or RINO. That is the lesson.
Where are our nukes!
I recently got a new HVAC system and the thermostat is a smart touch screen. It can be connected to WiFi so that I can have an app and use it on my phone. I haven’t done that because I fear it could be used just like discussed above.
I want to know if these smart thermostats have to be connected to Wifi by me in order to allow this Fascistic intrusion into my home or can it be done independent of setting it up for Wifi?
I think the green energy scam may not accomplish it’s goal of de-industrializing Western Civilization as intended since I read that banks are ditching green energy and investing in Nuclear power plants.
As long as the thermostat control is attached to government thermostats FIRST I could probably live with it knowing that our bureaucrats were suffering the same heat or cold as we are! Ain’t gonna happen! Ya know they need their air conditioning so they perform efficiently. Same for our social elites! Only us peasants will have to suffer!
We frogs are adapting as the water slowly comes to a boil.
“Load management’ at the consumer level is over 40 years old and was pioneered by the rural cooperatives in the south USA. In that case they shed load by shutting down water heaters for a couple of critical hours that are already pretty effective energy capacitors. This had ZERO impact on consumers except to lower their bills.
The idea is to shed load during high demand periods when the cost is the highest. It is a good idea for consumer and producer, but I can see HVAC is tricky. The key question is whether the consumer can over-ride it, I think. If you work in an office and don’t have a pet at home, it makes perfect sense to save energy when you are not in the home.
I was not aware that this concept had been implemented poorly causing health issues. I will be looking for confirmation of this. Thanks.
Daniel, if you are looking for energy related government BS, check out how regulators and energy companies colluded to produce a dog’s breakfast for consumers in Georgia when the last nuclear reactor built in the US was put in service. A good idea resulted in the highest energy costs for consumers in the entire country. This is the type of collusion that will destroy America. (Vogtle Electric Generating Plant,)
BIG BROTHER GO AWAY SKREET SKREET SKREEEE
In my area of Virginia, they have installed “Smart Electric meters” .Does anyone know if these can be used to reduce your electric consumption? I have noticed on occasions that my thermostat is not reading at the temperature that it was set on.
Here is an idea, we deport all the illegal aliens in America, reduce legal immigration by 50% and that will reduce America consumption of electric power, clean water, air pollution, congestion on our roads, the need for more classrooms, the need to print government forms in multiple languages, reduce government workers in the welfare offices and many other benefits as well.
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