Off-Peak Power Storage

Would it be efficient to store power when price is low?

People are doing just that to take advantage of off peak pricing:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-10...

I took it as over-heating/cooling during peak electric production time (daylight probably) when power is more available in order to reduce usage during off-peak times. I think it would require compulsion or a large amount of voluntary adoption on the part of the customers to really make much of a difference though, and I doubt that the latter is likely on a meaningful scale (though I could be wrong of course).

It depends on what you mean by "harming". But to answer your question, yeah, most of them. I've been preparing my home to switch to time of use energy pricing, where power is less expensive at night when there's lower demand. It's pretty painless to put things on timers or set schedules in configuration. The trivial cost of setting this up will pay for itself within about two months.Deferring workloads for when it's sunny is almost the exact opposite: using more

It's a peaking plant, you don't run it flat out all day, you charge it off-peak and then use it to help cover the 4pm-7pm demand surge.

Everyone seems to be forgetting that you can get paid to transmit your extra power back to the grid during the day. Air conditioning, for example, is high during the day. You might not need it at home but someone else will.

Electric rates are the same around here 24/7. If it's more expensive to provide baseline load at night, increase the night rates.Elastic uses of power, like charging car batteries, running the dryer, heating the water heater, etc., can be shifted to when power is cheaper.I.e. reducing demand for night power is a cheap and effective means of dealing with the sun not shining at night.

shit I would invest in a power wall and time shift my power usage to the night.

I wish more places had hourly pricing of power, with good integrations. Would be really cool to be able to set up your appliances/AC/electric car to consume more power when it is cheap. And then you could get battery banks for your house to store power when it is cheap and use it when it is expensive, absorbing the peaks in a decentralized way.

If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to house during expensive times of electricity. And then charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those goes guys go to 0% usage.