The Energy Collective – by Katherine Tweed
Demand response court challenges can’t stop residential programs.
TXU Energy was one of the first energy retailers to offer a smart thermostat program, way back in 2009.
The Texas retailer has now chosen EnergyHub to manage those thermostats, which number in the tens of thousands, according to EnergyHub.
The iThermostat program will now come with location-based controls, via which customers can set their thermostats to adjust as a mobile device leaves or returns to the house. The system works so that multiple devices are all connected.
For the past five years, Comverge was the platform provider for TXU’s iThermostat program. Recently, however, TXU has been looking to increase its offerings in the competitive landscape of Texas electricity companies.
Last month, TXU chose Bidgely to power its energy engagement solution, which is offered to the utility’s 1.5 million residential customers. In the past, TXU had used a homegrown solution.
EnergyHub scored another small win this week, this time with another early leader in varied residential energy offerings: Salt River Project.
Salt River Project is arguably one of the most successful utilities in the domains of time-of-use pricing, prepay plans and overall customer satisfaction. Most customers on the EZ3 rate plan, under which prices can jump up to more than $0.30 cents per kilowatt-hour in the blazing Arizona summer, already save money versus those on a flat-rate plan.
With its new EnergyHub pilot, Salt River Project will see if 250 customers can save even more than the average 6 percent with the help of a smart thermostat. The pilot is part of a larger research project being undertaken with the Electric Power Research Institute and other utilities. If successful, the pilot could bolster the confidence of other utilities when it comes to offering smart thermostat rebates for customers on time-of-use rate plans.
If you’re thinking that the concept of running a pilot to determine whether smart thermostats can save energy seems a bit dated, well, it is. But for many utilities, especially those that need to seek public utility commission approval for every move they make, there is an endless appetite for piloting technologies that are already being used successfully by other utilities.
Those utilities that have stepped it up with more ambitious approaches are often finding success. Comverge and Pepco Maryland recently announced that about half of their customers (that is, more than 360,000) have signed up for Energy Wise Rewards. The program, which includes direct load control and smart thermostats, has more than doubled in size in the past two years and controls about 300 megawatts.
The growth of and continued interest in smart thermostat programs is evidence that even with the current and emerging legal challenges facing the larger demand response market, both regulated and deregulated utilities are looking for options to deepen their relationships with their customers and tap homes for meaningful peak reduction in summers.
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I set the smart thermostat to 74 degrees and then I left my house to do some quick shopping. All I need at the supermarket is some chicken and some potatoes for supper. I return to my home 55 minutes later and as I walk into my house it’s like an oven. A blast of hot air smacks me in my face as I walk in. I quickly look at the thermometer for the inside of the my home and it reads a shocking 125 degrees! I run to the crib and look at my two year old baby and he’s dead. Not breathing. I look in the corner and there’s my dog lying down….dead. They all “suffocated”. They are all dead…in less than an hour. All because government forced me to turn over my heating to an outside source. What do I tell my relatives?
When I worked for Carrier Enterprise (an AC/Heating Company), the corporate office made us sit in a meeting room and listen to this one marketing asshole talk about smart thermostats and how great it would be to set your thermostat at home from anywhere in town with just a simple phone app. My former co-workers (most of them were older than me and some of them were even half-awake to what is really going on) were completely amazed and thought it was the coolest thing and even wanted one. However, I just looked at them like they were nuts because they all fell for the sweet talk bullshit hook line and sinker. I just sat there thinking, why would anyone want to give control of their AC/Heating over to a computer or SMART app that has proven time and again to be hacked and in which companies have used to raise their electric bills and that it is being used to take over their house?
But hey, what do I expect from a company that fires someone for saying, “Ugh. I’m so angry, I could just shoot someone.”?