My local electric company, SDGE wants to pay me $25 per year to put a control on my central air conditioning unit that would allow them to turn it off in case of extreme demand. I haven’t used the A/C in the almost 2 years I’ve lived in my house, so this would sound like a great deal. However, what happens if this year I really, really want to spend the insane amount of money to cool my house and it happens to be on the same day there is an extreme energy shortage? I won’t be able to do it. Some of you may be thinking that it would be selfish for me to want to turn on my A/C when there is an energy problem, but I’m entitled to use it once in awhile as I conserve as much as I can all the time. When we first moved in, we have ceiling fans placed throughout the house so we wouldn’t have to turn on the A/C and we have a programmable thermostat so that we only heat the house for a few hours a day when it is cold. While I don’t want to use my air conditioning, I don’t want anyone else to be able to say when I can’t use it. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.