If consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of things: they'd pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day costs, preventing behavior adjustment.
It's nowhere near the price differential that wholesale is, though. Last I checked, PG&E charged 62c/kwh at peak, and 52c/kwh off-peak. Back in 2020 it was 29c/kwh peak and 22c/kwh off-peak. That's roughly a 25% difference, but the actual wholesale price is off by several factors.
Well yeah because most people are away from home during those hours so there's little you can do. And workplaces, schools like that working hours are when electricity is cheap.
Workers might start demanding WFH or that their leisure hours be during the day and we can't have that.
The point is to enable markets for the technologies (many existing today!) that would let you time-shift effectively. Smart lights and smart thermostats are nifty gimmicks today; if electricity cost 100x more at primetime, they'd become critical investments. Insulating and air-sealing your home is known technology, but often not cost-effective when you can just burn a little more natural gas. Workplace charging is a perk, not a deciding factor for where people choose to accept a job. If the consequences of people's decisions were priced into the cost of them, people might make different decisions.
I'm not sure smart things and sealing would be the go-to solution when we're talking 100x the cost. Even 10x the cost starts to make the electricity bill close to rent. Whole house batteries, gas/pellet heaters, and gas stoves would suddenly get a lot more popular.
I'm not sure "throw out your major appliances that run on electricity and don't even look at plug-in EVs" is the direction we want to go when being able to cheaply meet evening demand at the grid level with renewables is the eventual goal.
The 100x comes from it being way cheaper during off-peak, not way more expensive during peak. You see the wholesale rates on this site; they're negative or a few cents/kwh at most. If that price differential were translated to retail we'd see rates of ~1c/kwh off-peak and ~$1/kwh peak, which is a pretty strong reason to charge your EV off-peak.
I don't understand why the government don't do more to support these kind of tariffs that incentive demand shifting.. it seems such a powerful way to make the grid greener without huge infrastructure projects
They're very unpopular with consumers, who are allergic to price increases and particularly to variable price increases. Look at the blowback to Wendy's surge pricing on burgers, or to Uber surge pricing, or to toilet paper scalpers in COVID, or to any notion that you might lose your job and need to retrain in a different one in response to changes in the economy.
The last thing a politician wants to do is lose an election, and losing an election is usually what happens when you suggest that the electorate bear the consequences of their behavior. As a result, we usually drive straight off a cliff, have a war or societal collapse, and then whoever survives it can go build a new system out of the rubble.
