Technology

We can’t talk about things like this like they’re free.

Some shifts genuinely are free, though. Wholesale prices for electricity follow a pronounced "duck curve," and drop to near zero (or even negative) in areas where there's a substantial solar base, during the day at certain parts of the year. People will shift their demand for non-time-sensitive consumption (heating, cooling, charging of devices/EVs, batched/scheduled jobs) in response to basic price signals. If a substantial amount of future demand is going to be from data centers performing batched/scheduled jobs, like training AI models or encoding video files, a lot of that demand can be algorithmically shifted.

There are already companies out there intentionally arbitraging the price differences by time of day to invest in large scale storage. That's an expensive activity, that they've determined is worth doing because there's profit to be made at scale.

At household scale, individuals can do that too.

Put another way, we shouldn't talk about current pricing models where every kilowatt hour costs the same as if that arrangement is free.

Plus, the timing of consumption already does naturally tend to follow the timing of solar generation. Most people are more active during the day than at night, and work hours reflect that distribution. Overcapacity in solar can go a long way towards meeting demand when it naturally happens.