Some places have regulated the price for power fed back into the grid to make it more equitable and to encourage more build out. As it stands it’s mostly an irritant for the power company; but with enough of it going on it might begin to be useful. Meanwhile it’s a bit round about to heat with solar via solar panels; but I’m not surprised that it might still have beter payback than selling it to the power company. I wonder what he could do with the extra during the summer; must be something?

Someone in town put in solar panels on his shed’s roof. He’s generating much more than he needs these days and it gets put back into the grid. Next March the utility does an accounting for the year and they’ll pay him for any excess, but at a very low wholesale rate. So he figures on installing space heaters and using up all the excess come winter.

Some utilities use that tarriff for home heating; you sink a lot of heat into something over night and then keep the house warm during prime hours.

Part of the load balancing puzzle is exactly how fine grain the response can be. This is all complementary with the energy storage problem. For example fly wheels are used for energy storage scenarios where the time constants are particularly short. Keeping the current in phase, or absorbing/releasing bursts from electric trains starting and stopping – that kind of thing. So there is another aspect beyond the signaling one I was focused on above.

Sure you’d need to know how much electricity has been consumed in each hour but then you have a very straightforward economic incentive for users to install these smart fridges. It could even be dynamic – like the cheap hours would vary day to day.