"appears to ramp up after 9 p.m., just after peak [demand] hours pass in California."
“I plug it in as soon as I get home and I leave the next day, and it has automatically chosen to charge when the wind is blowing the hardest in Colorado,” he said.a service for Nest thermostats that enables a house to adjust its heating or cooling slightly to rely more on clean energy. This is relatively easy, since heating and cooling programs are always cycling on and off anyway.
“When temperatures increase in places like Texas or the Southeast or California, prices for electricity and emissions from electricity closely track outdoor temperature,” Dyson explained. “As it gets hotter and hotter, electricity gets more and more expensive and dirtier and dirtier." New services, some offered through utilities, are making such programs available to people who do not want to pay the subscription fees to Google Nest. OhmConnect, the largest company doing this, calls itself “a virtual power plant” and pays customers for reducing their energy use at key times when the grid is dirty and over-burdened. The company says it has more than 200,000 customers enrolled in energy reduction programs.
" between it and an outlet. Lamps, however, don't cycle off and on. So the way a smart plug works is that when electricity demand rises, the lamp will turn off. If you want to turn it back on, you can, and it will stay on, but it ensures that if you absent-mindedly leave the lights on when you're not even in a room, they won't use electricity when it's dirtiest or most expensive.