I understand your post.
All I was doing is talking about the effective and painless system used for decades by our rural electric co-op to do some peak load limiting in summer.
We’ve got an electronic load balancer on our water heater. Not provided by the utility company though. It saves us energy all year. 24/7. IF you want a hot shower at 3am you might not have as much and as hot of water than if you take a hot shower at 7am. It’s worked for us. WithOUT external control of the dialie thingies in my house.
It’s seldom on during the day because the little computer thingie has determined we don’t use hot water then. And does this 365d/yr.