One of the neatest things I've learned about on Technology Connections was an induction cooktop that used 120V electricity. It had a bank of batteries in it that would provide power for cooking without overloading the mains, and you could plug appliances into it in the event of a power failure and still be able to cook.
If you had appliances storing energy like that you could level out demand curves. And you can also store energy with heat. If we had temperature regulator valves on our water heaters, we could get them to 160-170 degrees when energy is cheap and let them coast down to 120. Heating water is one of the major energy expenditures for a home, so if we could get that to be 100% renewable would be a huge advance.
One of the neatest things I've learned about on Technology Connections was an induction cooktop that used 120V electricity. It had a bank of batteries in it that would provide power for cooking without overloading the mains, and you could plug appliances into it in the event of a power failure and still be able to cook.
If you had appliances storing energy like that you could level out demand curves. And you can also store energy with heat. If we had temperature regulator valves on our water heaters, we could get them to 160-170 degrees when energy is cheap and let them coast down to 120. Heating water is one of the major energy expenditures for a home, so if we could get that to be 100% renewable would be a huge advance.