New Smart Energy Incentives

New Smart Energy Incentives

Time Of Use (TOU) electricity pricing can benefit households and businesses that are able to take advantage of reduced off-peak tariffs and have the flexibility to avoid electricity use in peak periods. There will be other households and businesses that cannot in any practical way undertake this load shifting between peak and off-peak demand periods. A question to consider is: Can these other households and businesses contribute in other ways to reduce peak demand so that they too benefit from electricity price incentives? One possibility is for a number of such households and businesses to participate in a club that adjusts the timing of duty cycles of some of their appliances such as space heaters, air conditioners, refrigerators and water heaters to smooth out the electricity demand of these appliances. Note that the aggregate energy demand will remain unchanged. The adjustment of duty cycle start-times avoids situations where a significant group appliances would otherwise turn on at about the same time and then all turn off at about the same time, resulting in "tidal" peaks and troughs in demand. The households and businesses that can contribute to load-smoothing in this way do not need smart meters or time-of-use tariffs to trial the viability of this approach. There is low-cost technology to monitor energy use by appliances that might be managed by an energy load-smoothing club and make that information available over the internet for aggregation and analysis on behalf of the club members.  A collection of illustrations of this technology is in the post  Smart Energy Future.

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