People in general are idiots and would freeze to death at the end of the month just as they roll to credit when the paycheck dries up.

You’d have to do it on a day to day basis or hourly. That could actually work - use too much power in an hour or day and it shuts off for awhile.

GP suggests capping power, not energy, which avoids this scenario.

Do you mean limiting the size of the service to a house? Because unless you have massive batteries for intermittent loads that would prohibit dryers and ovens from being electric.

If we're going to the effort of having dual-service to each home, we could have the "essentials" service of 500W or something that we'd try to make very reliable, to operate the fridge, medical equipment, communications, or whatever the residents deemed essential. Then the other, regular service could still have whatever capacity was already there, but would be subject to intermittent blackouts as necessary to keep everyone's essentials on.

This would require some additional infrastructure, but might be worth it if the blackouts are going to be too frequent.

So your freezer shuts down when your toaster is on? A hard cap that's low enough to make a difference seems like a bad idea, there are many devices which shouldn't be cut off suddenly. And that's ignoring things like medical devices.

Of course there's already a hard cap (usually ~9kW over here), but I suspect most people never reach it.

There are plans in Belgium to charged based on peak power (something silly like "max power used in any 15 minute period"), which would drive up the cost for the average consumer without reducing demand (as people tend not to have much choice in when they use their most power hungry appliances).

> So your freezer shuts down when your toaster is on?

That is actually not a bad idea. Would only decrease power though, not energy consumption.

(Assuming the freezer is built to read the power meter and decide when to not run the compressor).

US houses can draw 166 KW (or half that if older 100amp service) but you’d probably be raided for running a grow op.

I think you've got your units mixed up. 100A @ 120V = 12kW. Assuming the newer homes are 200A, that would be 24kW. 166kW seems ... unreasonable, especially over 120V, that's like 1400A. Toasty.

US homes are measured at 240 volts. 100 amp would be on each of the 120v legs.

High power US home is 200 amp times 240 volts. More typical homes are 100 amp or 150 amp.

As the other person posted, you are mistaken.

Houses in north America are fed with two 120V "legs" and so the 100A is actually at 240V.

Ah I found 200 amps at 220 threephase which is still a bit more than most houses.

Your math was still off, 200 amps at 220v three-phase is ~76.2 kW.

200*220*sqrt(3)=76210 watts