By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: January 11, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO - The conceit in the 1960s show "The Outer Limits" was that
outside forces had taken control of your television set.

Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency
power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down
through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or
substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.

The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California
Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy
efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air
conditioners and refrigerators. The changes would allow utilities to adjust
customers' preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring.
Customers could override the utilities' suggested temperatures. But in
emergencies, the utilities could override customers' wishes.

Final approval is expected next month.

"You realize there are times - very rarely, once every few years - when you
would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including
your computer and traffic lights, and you don't want to do that," said
Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission.

Reducing individual customers' electrical use - if necessary,
involuntarily - could avoid that, Dr. Rosenfeld said. "If you can control
rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain," he said,
"there's a lot less pain to go around."

While the proposals have received little attention in California, the
Internet and talk radio are abuzz with indignation at the idea.

The radio-controlled thermostat is not a new technology, though it is
constantly being tweaked; the latest iterations were on display this week at
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Pacific Gas and Electric, the major utility in Northern California, already
has a pilot program in Stockton that allows customers to choose to have
their air-conditioning systems attached to a radio-controlled device to
reduce use during periods when electricity rates are at their peak.

But the idea that a government would mandate use of these devices and
reserve the power to override a building owner's wishes galls some people.

"This is an outrage," one Californian said in an e-mail message to Dr.
Rosenfeld. "We need to build new facilities to handle the growth in this
state, not become Big Brother to the citizens of California."

The broader stir on the Internet began when Joseph Somsel, a San Jose-based
contributor to the publication American Thinker, wrote an article a week ago
on the programmable communicating thermostat, or P.C.T.

Mr. Somsel went after the proposal with arguments that were by turns
populist ("Come the next heat wave, the elites might be comfortably lolling
in La Jolla's ocean breezes" while "the Central Valley's poor peons are
baking in Bakersfield"), free-market ("P.C.T.'s will obscure the price
signals to power plant developers") and civil libertarian ("the new P.C.T.
requirement certainly seems to violate the 'a man's home is his castle'
common-law dictum").

Word of the California proposal hit the outrage button in corners of the
Internet, was written about in The North County Times in Southern
California, and got a derisive mention on Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh's radio
program.

The fact that similar radio-controlled technologies have been used on a
voluntary basis in irrigation systems on farm fields and golf courses and in
limited programs for buildings on Long Island is seldom mentioned in
Internet postings that make liberal use of references of George Orwell's
dystopian novel "1984" and "Big Brother," the omnipresent voice of Orwell's
police state.

Ralph Cavanagh, an energy expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council,
said in an interview that at a time of peak electricity use, "most people
given a choice of two degrees of temperature setback and 14th-century living
would happily embrace this capacity."

Mr. Somsel, in an interview Thursday, said he had done further research and
was concerned that the radio signal - or the Internet instructions that
would be sent, in an emergency, from utilities' central control stations to
the broadcasters sending the FM signal - could be hacked into.

That is not possible, said Nicole Tam, a spokeswoman for P.G.& E. who works
with the pilot program in Stockton. Radio pages "are encrypted and encoded,"
Ms. Tam said.