Below are comments to the article 2040: A Pricing Odyssey by Ahmad Faruqui:
Shouldn’t the response to the opponents be that customers won’t be confused because it will all be programmed into the home energy systems that we tell our grandchildren to program for us, giving them our preferences/tolerances for temperatures etc. and it will just happen.
The real choice we face is the willingness to buy the home energy system in the first place, but, if we could legislate standards in the future that require homes to have these control systems then the problem will be solved.
We never trust people to make rational decisions because we got what Simon told us about bounded rationality. Appliance standards, energy star, building standards – like Erich Fromm used to argue in Escape from Freedom, that choice is actually not good because you have to think, so we are willing to becoming lemmings and let others tell us what to do.
So, let’s embrace human nature and put it in the programming. Defeat anti-choice voice with pre-programming and the energy system will become efficient by default.
–Karl McDermott, University of Illinois, Springfield