The original call
Original year: 2012
2026 assessment
Scorecard verdict: Hit
Hit. Time-of-use rates, smart thermostats, and grid-aware appliances are now mainstream. Your Nest and ecobee thermostats pre-cool your home before peak pricing, EV chargers wait for cheap overnight rates, and the Matter standard exists specifically so devices and home energy management systems can coordinate this automatically. The “iPhone-weaned” generation I described did exactly what I said it would when it started buying houses.