Pricing signals work!

Pricing signals work!  Some years ago now, power companies started variable pricing on their electrical power.  They charge more per kilowatt-hour during peak usage periods (like the hot afternoons), and less during off-hours (like early in the morning).  This differential can be very large, 3:1 or more depending on where you live.  Worse, the differential is increasing – power companies have “discovered” it as a source of price increases that can be sold as discouraging power use, making the greenies happy.

That pricing difference got people thinking about how to get around it.  Who wants to buy expensive electricity, if they could get it cheaper?  It's not like the expensive electrons are any shinier, or more glamorous – they're precisely the same, just more expensive.  The issue is more of a problem for some kinds of businesses (like hotels), where they really have to use the electricity, and they use a lot more than homeowners.

The whole thing boils down to when you buy the electricity.  If you could buy it at night when it's cheap, store it, and they use the stored power in the afternoon – why then you'd win, wouldn't you?  That's exactly what these folks have done, at a scale that works for a hotel.  There's no reason I can think of why something like this wouldn't work at a homeowner's scale, either – so I expect to see it one of these fine days.

Of course, then the power companies will have to come up with a new way to extract money from us.  If they were actually unregulated and competitive, this would all sort itself out – but since they are highly regulated in all 50 states, the result will quite predictably be a big hairy mess.  What precise flavor of a big hairy mess it will be, I don't know.  But I don't think it matters all that much...