Written edition
Utilities want direct control of your smart thermostat
Today's stories share a quiet theme: infrastructure and control are becoming the real battleground, whether it's who commands your thermostat, who owns the vertiport, or who manufactures the hardware behind software promises.
Frontier tech is maturing from clever ideas into contested physical and regulatory territory.
Utilities push to seize direct control of smart thermostats
Power companies are demanding the ability to directly override smart thermostats like Google Nest during peak demand, cutting your air conditioning when the grid is strained rather than just nudging you with price signals. For homeowners, that's a real tension: lower electricity bills if the system works, but less say over your own house on the hottest days. For Nest and its rivals, it's a fork in the road. Either they build grid integration into the product as a selling point, or regulators and utilities force the issue anyway through rate design and mandates. The smart home's next decade may be decided less by app features than by who gets to flip the switch.
