Yup. Heating and cooling are 2 things that can be delayed in most cases with little negative effects. A hot water tank set at 60C isn't going to be harmed if it's allowed to cool to 55C due to high power demand it also doesn't instantly empty out with usage.

The same is true about climate control. 1 or 2C from the desired temperature is still pretty comfortable but can make a huge difference in power savings, particularly if it's coordinated.

That said, I suspect that the even better route for power companies to go down is installing more grid batteries. Those can directly address and smooth out high demand. Put them at the various substations and you can shut off the main grid to the substation temporarily under high load.

To emphasise your point, this is already happening. It's not theoretical. Data Centres across the world can already get signals from their grid, and will do things like proactively switch to local generators.

Nearly 20 years ago I had such a wonderful debugging experience when the power grid where I lived sent a "switch to backup" message and then milliseconds later a cancellation. The colo's power system got jammed between generator and mains electricity and everything rapidly ran out of UPS backup power and died. I found so many dependency loops between servers that day, took me hours to get things back up and running.

And domestic providers like Octopus are also incentivising voluntary reduction (e.g. during saving sessions, which were National Grid experiments), or consumption when there is a glut of renewables with free energy, so if people want to save money they CAN load shift.

And with more and more houses installing solar and battery, opting into shoring up the grid for a decent uplift in standard export rates would be of interest to many.

Here is a recent article about a small town in western Massachusetts. The headline is about the natural gas feeds be at saturation for the town. Buried in the article is a comment about our electricity also being bumping against capacity. National Grid is the electric provider.

I have been expanding solar thermal because it’s free of both of these constraints.

https://www.iberkshires.com/story/83932/Williamstown-s-Gas-S...

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