22K Customers Locked Out Of Their Thermostats During Colorado “Energy Emergency”

This is a story about what happens when you relinquish personal control to an authority entity. This is also a cautionary tale about the digital money agenda. Let’s learn from sweaty Denverites and not make the same mistakes.

It’s summertime in Denver, which means it’s pretty darn hot. But on Tuesday, 22,000 customers of the local Xcel energy company discovered that they couldn’t cool their homes because they had been locked out of their smart thermostats. Customers who tried to lower the temperature on their thermostat were given the message,

“Temperature locked temporarily during energy emergency. Due to a rare energy emergency that may affect the local energy grid, your temperature slider has been changed from 8:00 pm-8:00 pm because you enrolled in a Community Energy Savings program.”

One customer told ABC Denver,

“Normally, when we see a message like that, we’re able to override it. In this case, we weren’t. So, our thermostat was locked in at 78 or 79.”

Some social media users complained of much higher compulsory home temperatures, including in the high 80s.

But the program was voluntary. These customers voluntarily enrolled in the Colorado AC Rewards program in exchange for a $100 credit to their bill, as well as a $25 annual bonus for every year they participate. So for $125, customers voluntarily surrendered their personal control to a socialist energy program. Here’s what Xcel told customers they were signing up for:

“By participating in AC Rewards, adjustments are made to your smart thermostat during the hottest summer days. When the demand for electricity is the highest, you’ll help us manage these peaks and ease the strain on the electrical grid. You’ll be cut back on the time your central air works to cool your home with control events.

Control events may occur anytime during the cooling season. You’ll have the ability to opt out of control events at any time and receive optional notifications of control events, either from your thermostat, mobile device, or web app. On rare occasions, system emergencies may cause a control event that cannot be overridden.”

Maybe people didn’t really read what they were signing up for and just wanted the $125? Maybe people didn’t think it would really be that bad or or might not happen at all? And that’s kind of the problem with socialist programs. They look very enticing to ignorant or gullible people. But once you’re actually suffering the consequences of that socialist program, it’s a terrible experience. And usually, it’s also too late to do anything about it.

Emmett Romine, Vice President of customer solutions and innovation for Xcel said,

“It helps everybody for people to participate in these programs. It is a bit uncomfortable for a short period of time, but it’s very, very helpful.”

Of course they’re selling it as being for the greater good. That’s one of their favorite ways to package socialism. That, and “convenience.” Now imagine the financial system being entirely digital and therefore entirely controllable like Denver’s air conditioning. But now, instead of an “energy emergency” that requires someone else to control your energy, it’s an “equity emergency” that requires someone else to control your spending habits. Suddenly, instead of finding you can’t cool your house, you find that you can’t purchase a T-shirt from that store that refused to post a black square on social media in the summer of 2020. Perhaps it’s a different kind of “energy emergency” and now you find you can’t purchase a gas car, only an electric one, because the powers that be decided it would be for the greater good to prohibit purchases of gas vehicles. Or maybe you just hit your weekly allotment of gas purchases at the pump, so now your card is declined until next week. Perhaps it’s not an “emergency” at all, they just decide that you are dangerous to society because you don’t believe that men can be women just by saying so, and you suddenly find that your accounts are frozen until you publicly repent of the social sin of having an unapproved opinion.

The more control you relinquish, the more powerful they get. And authoritarians don’t voluntarily return power to the people.