That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity.

Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.

in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!"

rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.

Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.

There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the situations to be similar.

I just read some people in Texas are camping out in their cars to keep warm.

The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).