A headline on Fox Nation today claimed “GREEN INSANITY: Companies Remotely Shut Off Your Air Conditioners.” However, The Post and Courier article to which Fox Nation linked clearly explains that two North Carolina-based utilities are briefly shutting off the air conditioners of customers who volunteered for this to happen at times of high energy usage in return for an annual payment.

As The Post and Courier reports, the two utilities involved, Raleigh-based Progress Energy and Charlotte-based Duke Energy, briefly cycle off thousands of household air conditioning units, allowing them to ease the burden on their power grids. Households are not randomly selected by the utilities but, rather, are “paid to voluntarily let the companies cycle their power on and off.” (Progress pays its participants $25 a year; Duke pays $32.) The programs, which are activated when many of the participants are at work, “can shave off enough power to offset a small power plant.”

Fox Nation routinely posts false headlines and publishes misinformation about environmental issues. This is just one of the more obvious examples.