> heating/cooling my house is half my energy bill. Time shifting that could easily cut that by a third. All I need to make that work is variable rates.

This isn't as simple as you make it sound. You can't just cool your house once when electricity is cheap and then have it stay cool all day. Keeping your house at a different temperature than outside is a constant, active process.

There are industrial systems that "store" cold by making large blocks of ice when electricity is cheap, and then using that ice as part of the HVAC system to cool the building throughout the day. This could be adapted to home use, but I have no idea the relative cost of the machinery vs electricity savings.

> This isn't as simple as you make it sound.

It is. There is no single comfortable temperature, it's a range. The first step is when electricity is cheap, cool the house to the low end of the range.

The next step is to cool a tank of water. People already have a hot water tank, it doesn't seem like much of an engineering or cost challenge to have a cold water tank, and using that to cool air.

A further step is to increase the thermal mass of the house, which means it will take longer to heat up. Thermal mass can be simply adding a big pile of rocks in the basement and blowing air through it.

I agree it's not _hard_, but your original assertion was "All I need to make that work is variable rates". Now, you're talking about installing additional HVAC equipment and spending $$$.

In the summer, even if you cool your house down to 60F, it'll be back to 70F in a couple hours max. Electricity rates from renewable overproduction do not vary on the timescale of hours. It's not a solution without new equipment to "store" the hot or cold that you produce when electricity is cheap.

A couple of hours still substantially reduces your demand during peak rate hours.

(Besides, I grew up in Arizona, and was comfortable up to 78 or so.)

How much money do you need to save for the incentive to exceed the effort and discomfort? If you make $50 an hour how much effort will you spend every day to save $50 a month?

I am sure the variable rates helped to incentivize people to conserve electricity in Texas recently but that is an extreme case.

Electricity infrastructure is capital intensive and long term stable rates are required to finance it.

> long term stable rates are required to finance it.

Gasoline prices vary all over the place, and there's a heluva lot of expensive infrastructure for it.

Compare gasoline prices to the electricity prices in Texas recently, Texas has experienced negative prices in windy periods and prices at the artificial market limit of 11,000 $/MWH, which is the equivalent of $396 / gallon of gasoline. Electricity prices change much faster and the swings are much larger than gasoline.

Electricity is different from gasoline since it can’t be easily stored production and consumption are always perfectly in balance.

Gasoline is a world wide commodity, whereas electricity is consumed relatively close to where it is generated.

Oil and gasoline are global markets, but there are many regional electricity markets with their own sets of regulations which are constantly evolving.

From what I’ve seen The only way people sink money in to building electrical infrastructure is with some long term certainty for prices from some buyer. Maybe it is different once the asset is paid off you can operate in the spot market but I believe financiers prefer the certainty of a fixed contract.

Maybe refineries that are built find a buyer for their product before they build them too?

I suspect that the wild price increases in Texas are from people not realizing the price had gone up and continued using electricity as usual. With demand not dropping, that just continues to push the price up.

I doubt this would happen a second time, as people wise up. They'll either monitor the electricity prices, or put automatic shutoffs in place if the price exceeds $xx.

> long term certainty

Higher levels of risk simply mean higher prices.