Not to mention the fact that IoT consumes lots of unnecessary power and stuff like Nest that tries to "conserve energy with AI" ends up consuming more power for an ultimately shittier experience than simply manually managing the system.

I suspect since there's money to extract and profit for the power companies, this will happen anyway in the next 5-10 years across the USA. I'm already bracing for the internet providers to start the same bullshit, claiming that the pipes are getting clogged at peak times...

I agree that it’s going to be painful. But it’s going to be painful either way because power plants take too long to build and we have an energy crunch now. We need to get power from somewhere and the only immediate solution is to level load the grid more efficiently. I do not think this is something that will make our lives better but it will make more efficient use of our existing power infrastructure and its something we will all have to deal with