Things are going from bad to worse in the liberal hellhole that has become Colorado, now with one of the state’s woke energy companies (Xcel Energy) locking some of its customers out of their smart thermostats, preventing them from lowering the temperature. Welcome to 1984!
And what made it lock certain customers out? Was it their profligate wastage of electricity, a bad social credit score, or swirling rumors that they supported the bad orange man? No, that’s so 2.5 years from now.
This time, the people who got locked out were put in the pickle because they signed themselves up for it…literally.
Now that smart appliances, appliances that are connected via WiFi and are part of a connected network meant to make you home life easier and more comfortable (or at least more futuristic seeming) have become more and more popular in recent years.
But it turns out it’s not just you that can raise and lower the temperature of your home remotely. If you’re a Coloradan that checked a certain box, Xcel energy can too. And it used that power to lock those customers that checked the box out of their thermostats, stopping them from cooling their homes beyond a certain point as a way of helping limit energy use.
Louder with Crowder, reporting on that situation and what led to it, noted that:
Emmett Romine, vice president of some made-up title at Xcel, tells ABC7 that for a $100 credit and a savings of $25 dollars a month–yes $25 whole dollars–customers voluntarily sign away the right to control their own thermostat in the case of an “emergency.”
If you read the fine print “adjustments are made to your smart thermostat during the hottest summer days.” Customers who sign control away for $25 a year can sometimes override the controls, but “on rare occasions, system emergencies may cause a control event that cannot be overridden.”
The rare occasion in this case? An outage in Pueblo, hot weather, and too many people using their air conditioners.
This time they used that little box that was checked to limit air condition use on a hot day. What next?
What if some enterprising bureaucrat with a serious set of worries about climate change decides that it’s high time to declare the climate change situation they think exists an “emergency”?
Under the terms of the Xcel agreement, technically the company could then lock customers out of their thermostats; if climate change is an “emergency”, then that fits the bill for when they can step in and override user controls…and maybe it would actually do so, particularly in a blue state if officials started leaning on the company to “take climate change seriously”. Affected customers will have to get used to balmy apartments, I suppose.
So perhaps a smart appliance isn’t as smart a decision as it first seems. Perhaps just an old one that a woke energy company can’t override to make sure you do your part to fight the angry sun monster or whatever other phantom menace they come up with in the name of expanding the control of bureaucrats into your life.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Facebook and Subscribe to My Email List