Someone posted

"They may not warrant doing it, but utilities are doing
it and offering different rates at different times of the
day to residential customers. That is nothing new.
Here in NJ the utility was doing that 50 years ago.
The offered a substantially lower rate at night for water heaters."


We lived in NJ 50 years ago, and had a clocked water heater meter.
Only trouble was, we had so many power outages that the clock was
rarely set to the correct time and so we always had to go outside and
look at the meter to see when we could heat hot water. We didn't
complain to the power company because there was nothing they could do
except set it right and pray fopr no more power failures.