More expensive and more socially and technologically complex are incentivized “opt in” programs like the one Pepco runs in Washington, D.C. These give modest cash payments to individual households, usually in the neighborhood of forty dollars a summer, in exchange for “letting the utility automatically control their air conditioners on the few summer days when system demand is highest.” Xcel has started something similar in Colorado. Their program is called the Saver’s Switch, and it involves a small device that resembles a beeper of old, installed by the utility on the outside of your house,
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