You shouldn’t have to set your thermostat at 78 in July

Louisiana gets hot in July. No one is surprised by that.

So it’s particularly frustrating to see headlines like:

with recommendations to “raise your thermostat by several degrees during peak afternoon hours.”

We live in a resource rich state in the richest country in the history of the world - why can’t we use our air conditioning when it’s crazy hot outside?

Louisiana’s power plants run at 46% capacity on average. Imagine an airline operating flights at 46% full. It would go bankrupt, of course. 100% utilization is not realistic. Power plants are down for maintenance. We need reserves. Blah blah.

But 46%??? Come on. The Brattle Group — the same kind of firm utilities hire — modeled real utilities raising that number by ten points just by pairing new demand with smarter grid management, and it cut rates too. There is real room to do better.

For airlines, the free market solved this under-utilization problem: when there are more passengers than seats, offer money for volunteers to give up their seats. It is far cheaper for the airline to do this on rare occasions than to always run planes with empty seats.

Demand Response programs do the same thing with our electric grid.

Instead of threatening us with blackouts unless everybody turns up their thermostat, utilities could offer volunteers a little bit of cash to reduce their usage a couple dozen times per year.

If you have neighbors willing to sit in 78 degrees for a few hours because they do not mind the heat, great. Pay them. It’s better than paying Entergy billions to build new power plants that are not needed most of the time.

Our Commissioners have not pushed this answer because they do not have the expertise to know it is an option, understand how to price it, or know how to implement it well. They don’t know that our grid is only 46% utilized. That there are no penalties for utilities for using so little of it. They think they are holding utilities accountable when they say, “pinky promise me that you really need that new power plant.”

Our widespread outage last Memorial Day weekend could have been avoided had we implemented Demand Response programs. I advised the Commission as much. Instead, they took the utilities at their word.

On Nov 3rd, we can hire someone who will stop monopoly utilities from taking advantage of us. You can help by sharing this with a friend or hosting a yard sign.

Stay cool out there.

Chris