Be A Neighbourhood Power Star!
Big Brother is watching you……. Ok, maybe not, but he’s definitely trying to control your furnace. ???
We just received a brochure from Hydro Ottawa inviting us to become a Neighbourhood Power Star. Pretty nifty concept, you sign up with them, and they’ll provide a $300 electronic thermostat in your home which will give you the capability to automatically manage your heating/air conditioning for different usage periods, i.e. while you are at work or sleeping your climate control doesn’t need to work so hard and can be set higher or lower.
Now this seems kind of cool to me. Although I have to wonder what kind of thermostat costs $300! Apparently these will also allow you to remotely control your home’s heat or a/c via the internet. Hmm. I wonder how my thermostat would get connected to my router? Hmm…. Then I read a little further, and I’ll quote for you:
On the hottest weekday afternoons during the summer, when the use of air conditioners is greatest, Hydro Ottawa may remotely raise the temperature in your home by one or two degrees for a brief period of time. Your fan will continue to run, so the change in temperature will hardly be noticeable, if at all…[snip]
It continues:
Adjusting your thermostat will occur infrequently, typically only on weekdays, and not on weekends or holidays. [here's the best part...] Plus, upon request, you will have the ability to opt out twice a year if you need to.
Twice per year opt-out privileges? Where do I sign up? Oh, almost forgot. JUST for participating, Hydro Ottawa will give you $25. Talk about frosting the sugar cake, huh? Suhweeet!
To be fair, I applaud the initiative. I respect any attempts to be greener by corporations, administrations and utilities. It can’t hurt. And truly, having a thermostat that allows you to set times where the furnace and a/c do not need to be running WILL save you money. (Hydro Ottawa claims up to 20%). However, I can’t help but wonder why they want this so bad…why add the $25 cheque to the deal? Why not disclose the possible dire situation the hydro industry is in necessitating this kind of initiative? No mention of rolling brown-outs, overloads on the grid, looming energy crisis. Nope. Just that it will save me up to twenty percent, and that I’ll get $25 and a neato free thermostat for my trouble (and signing away control of my home heating!) It makes me feel like I’m being “sold” something I maybe don’t need, or the benefits of which don’t justify the real cost. And what is the real cost? Well, it seems to me that allowing the good folks at Hydro to have the power to throttle your home heating and air conditioning at will is pretty substantial. The fact that you can “opt out up to twice per year” is a bit controlling…how does this thing work? What if I simply want a cooler house MORE than twice per year? How much control do they have?
I have some reservations… Letting a government-run organization control the basics of my existence, like climate, IN my home, when there has never been anything like this before, worries me. The $300 dollar thermostat? Lets say this takes off and they install it in 100,000 homes in Ottawa. Hmmm, that’s $30,000,000 or so they could have spent on alternate forms of education and programs to PASSIVELY persuade the public to better manage their household climate control. To help us learn better ways to manage our power consumption.
THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS. That’s just from 100000 homes. And don’t forget the $25 dollar payout for signing on….that’s another $250000. It begs the question, what other benefit does Hydro Ottawa get from putting these into homes? Seems like an awfully huge expense just to ease energy consumption at peak hours.
I don’t claim to know much about the cost of ad campaigns or public education….I just know that $32,500,000 per 100,000 homes is a lot of cake. And maybe studies show that education programs like what I’m envisioning don’t or have not worked in the past. But there just has to be a better way than letting Hydro Ottawa control it for me. Imagine the future if this takes off…water/heat/electricity, all supplied to you when it’s the most convenient (and profitable) for the suppliers to do so. This is what comes down the road this program travels on.
You know what I’d rather see? I’d rather see that $325 offered to me as a rebate for achieving some kind of energy consumption target based on my last year’s usage. Now THAT would be a great way to passively effect change in usage behaviours.
Just my 2 cents though…..
(side note, apparently my neighbourhood is on the docket for having Smart Meters installed, which will allow Hydro to bill me different rates of usage for different times hydro is used. I wonder what control systems those little meters have built inside….. :) )
Comments
I like the $325 incentive idea. Though really if we’d all reduce our energy consumption our bills would already go down — you could save way more than $325.
I assume this is all a desperate attempt to head off the brown-out/black-outs which is just bad news for hydro and they’ve gotta do something quick.
We suddenly had a smart meter installed here but I don’t think I’ll be becoming a Power Star. Too creepy. We’ve already got a thermostat that adjusts for different times and our house is very well insulated so I don’t feel too bad.
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