dpb wrote:

Residential customers don't consume enough electricity on an
individual level such that any decision they make in changing
(or time-shifting) their electricity usage will only affect
their monthly bill by pennies or at most a few dollars....

Overall, just nonsense.

It's a fact.

Industry experts and consumer advocates have said exactly the same
thing.

If there weren't a payback, they certainly wouldn't be doing it
just for the funsies of having something to do.

It's political.

Many utilities got grants to do it.

Like I said - they wanted to reduce their cost to read residential
meters. In the vast majority of situations, analog wheel-meters were
replaced by electronic time-of-use meters with telemetry capability.
This gave them the automation they were looking for (no more meter
readers) under the cover of the green / ecological movement (be good to
the environment and use energy responsibly and all that jazz).

Shifting usage of a _single_ residence slightly from peak to
off-peak hours won't make an impact, sure, but when 10s or 100s
of thousands do a little it can (and will) add up to a lot.

I'm telling you that if it means the difference between being
uncomfortable in your home by setting your thermostat higher in the
summer (and suffering when it's 76 degrees and 55 percent humidity) vs
setting it so you're comfortable (74 degrees and 40 percent humidity) -
guess what people are gonna do. Even if it costs them a buck extra a
day.

People won't opt to save chump change when it means they'll be
comfortable in their homes.

All that will add up to significant savings that eventually will
impact the consumer

The whole point of time-of-use billing was to go hand-in-hand with a
competitive marketplace for electricity, but someone forgot that we
don't really have a competitive marketplace in electrical generation or
distribution.

You and I can decide whether to buy gasoline at one station or another,
on one day or another, at one price or another. Gasoline has a flexible
distribution system in that the gas refined at one plant doesn't have to
be retailed by a specific gas station nor consumed by a specific
end-customer. We don't have that when it comes to electricity, and
hence the idea that time-of-use billing completes the picture of a true
competitive marketplace for electricity is a farce.