I guess one gets into the “smart highway” concept, when talking about the smart grid.
You can have very smart highway (and road) system. You can design it so that people pay 10 times as much to drive at 3 PM, versus 3 AM (say $1.00 per mile versus 10 cents per mile in the middle of the night - maybe even more during the day).
If you make people pay enough, they will change their behavior...even to the point of spreading out traffic equally all day and all night. That is a highway planner’s dream - you wind up with roads that are always operated at 90% of capacity (right through the middle of the night), traffic always moving at posted speeds, and the minimum number of lanes needed.
But here’s the question: Is that good for societay (as Jesse Jackson would say)? You’d have a situation where everyone is working crazy hours, people are forced to buy groceries at 2 in the morning, and totally messed up lives.
Me, I’d rather stick to the gas tax, build some extra lanes to help handle peak traffic, and give people the freedom to set their own hours.
As to the smart grid, it’s somewhat similar...because it will drive the same types of decisions - having companies shifting hours around to avoid peak electrical costs and we’ll end up having to show up at work at 4 AM. We’ll be nicely synched up with Europe if that happens, but life here would be lousy.
So my vote is to keep flat rates for electricity and keep a bunch of extra power plants available for peak times. Sure, it means the net cost of power goes up...but so does our freedom to organize our lives.
And by the way, I’m not too hot on providing the utilities with real-time information on my power usage (needed for the smart grid), or providing the government with real-time information on where I’m driving (regardless of whether Governor Rick Perry likes that idea).
The problem with the “smart highway” analogy is that every car on that “smart highway” is able to make their own choice - ie, your analogy that people are shopping at 0200.
The various different loads on a “smart grid” power system aren’t going to be that smart. Not even remotely. They’re going to be programmed to shed load based on marginal costs of power, and economics of electric power is going to work pretty much the same way for lots of folks (eg, office buildings are going to bring their HVAC systems online at largely the same times, and drop them offline at largely the same times to conform to the business day) so we’re not going to see lots of little choices made, we’re going to see large numbers of similar or identical choices made.
In the power grid, the grid operator and power generator have three variables:
Voltage, frequency and available current capacity.
Of those three variables, the grid operator can control two: the voltage and frequency.
The customer(s) control the current demand vs. current capacity. The only way that the operator can control this last variable is to shed load - the “rolling blackouts” are one example of the operator shedding load to make the load fit within their ability to supply current at a specified voltage and frequency.
Even now, we see these eggheads starting to discuss allowing the frequency on the grid to wander outside previously established parameters:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-06-24-power-grid-appliances-electronics_n.htm
This is stupid, in the extreme. Allowed to wander far enough outside parameters, this is going to result in some costly damage somewhere, because we EE’s have been able to make some pretty well-founded assumptions about the stability of the US power grid frequency for decades. We have had amazingly well regulated frequency. Now these eggheads realize they have only three variables they can change, and they can’t lower the voltage enough to shoehorn their idiotic ideas into reality, so they’re going to play with the frequency.
My choice is the same as yours: Build sufficient power generation and transmission capacity (and the latter should have good redundancy), and put peaker plants near large load areas (ie, cities) for use when the demand exceeds the transmission capacity into an area.
Whoa! That's a little apocalytic, isn't it?
We're talking about marginal rate differences that might entice some people to shift some of their electrical consumption -- not forcing them into becoming dwellers of the night.
I mean, putting the laundry in at 11pm just before bed or starting the dishes washing isn't going to cause societal disruption.