Big Brother or Clever Control

I scan read stuff and if of interest read the content more closely. Just recently I read an article on Centralised heating into a large apartment block, of no interst was the type of primary energy being used.

Someone somewhere calculated a heating load for the individual apartments say 4kW inclusive of DHW demand. The author of the article indicated if an apartment consumed more heating than the designed input, it is likely this could effect and reduce the heating into other apartments and unbalance the whole installation, perhaps leaving tennants with little heat.

HIU's are the most common device to deliver the heat for both space and DHW. With clever remote or local control of the primary heat input into the HIU, the amount of heat delivered would be limited to the designed input of energy.

Imagine if in your road where you live now, someone offered you a cheaper form of primary heat, say from a DH system and you agreed to proceed. However on Christams day with all your relatives around, cooking, heating, baths and showers, the hot water ran out!

You rang the energy company on their 24/7 hotline to discover the 3rd party calculated heating requirements were 10kW, and unfortunatley you were taking more than the designed input, sorry mate have anice day, what would you think?

Could this actually happen? And imagine taking the utility to Court, to find Governemnt had indeed passed a law based upon the calculated heat load, so you had little if any re-course.

This leaves the system designers in a quandry, the installers the same, the commisioning company (engineers) and system operators, having to defend at all levels, proof you were getting your 10kW limit as indicated by your heat meter!

QUESTION: could this actually happen?