I Overcool My House on Purpose

📬 Intro: The 1:55 PM Sprint

Every summer weekday at 1pm, my air conditioner sprints down to 70F. I'm on Georgia Power's Overnight Advantage rate, which makes electricity nearly free overnight and expensive from 2 to 7 weekday afternoons. So my thermostat overcools the house just before 2pm strikes, then lets it drift to a dry 79 or 80 while the meter naps.

Sounds miserable? It isn't! The other half of the plan is the car charging at 11pm. A thousand miles of driving costs me about $5 at the overnight energy rate.

And while my house is essentially a badly insulated thermal battery, the industrial-strength versions are already bidding into power markets.

🌍 Field Notes: Comfort Is Storable

⚡ The 14x Spread

Cutting its customers in on the savings of avoiding Gas Peaker plant use in summer heat, Georgia Power’s Overnight Advantage plan charges 2.19 cents per kWh in its super off-peak window (11pm-7am) and 29.79 cents on summer weekday afternoons from 2 to 7. Cooling shifted across that line costs 93% less!

Utility-managed smart-thermostat programs doing this at scale shave about 0.9 kW per house per event, and during California’s 2022 heat emergency, enrolled thermostats delivered 75 MW of relief. 100,000 houses running my 1pm trick is literally an entire gas power plant.

🧊 The Ice Bear Didn't Die

Remember the Ice Bear? It was a ‘jacket’ for your condenser (at home or commercial) where the unit froze water overnight and melted it during peak cooling. Its original maker went bankrupt in 2019. Thule Energy Storage now builds and sells the units (only commercial size, sadly) and claims they shave up to 95% of peak cooling load.

Nostromo Energy’s 1.4 MWh IceBrick array cools the Beverly Hilton and the Waldorf Astoria next door, and last November it became the first behind-the-meter thermal storage to sell into the CAISO wholesale market. On dispatch calls it shed over 200 kW. The Department of Energy has a $305.5 million conditional commitment to spread IceBricks across up to 193 California buildings. Trane’s ice systems already sit in over 4,000 installations. The hotel that hosts the Golden Globes now sells ice to the grid.

🌡 The Neighborhood-Sized Version

Owning an Ice Cub (yes that’s what the residential Ice Bear unit used to be called) is my personal ‘dream appliance’ but a grid slice of one would be great too. In Framingham, Massachusetts, Eversource runs the country’s first utility-owned geothermal network, about 140 customers heating and cooling off boreholes that hold a steady 55 degrees, with an $8.6 million DOE grant lined up to double it. Thirteen states now have thermal energy network laws on the books, four passed just last year.

During last June’s heat dome, with PJM at its highest load since 2011, EnergyHub’s fleet of thermostats and water heaters shed 900 MW while Sunrun dispatched 340 MW from home batteries. The grid's newest peaker plants are effectively ‘emissions free’ and scattered across a million basements and attics.

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🏛 Built to Last:

Overnight ice batteries, neighborhoods on a shared loop, and houses that bank cold at 1pm all pull the same lever: swap the expensive/dirty afternoon kilowatt-hours for cheap overnight ones.

By role:

🏠 Homeowners: Check your utility for a time-of-use (aka EV) rate. Pre-cooling plus a programmable thermostat is the whole setup, and Claude can walk you through the schedule math (and remind you to set dryers, dishwashers and dehumidifiers to come on at 11pm automatically for a 93% discount there too).

🏢 Facility managers: Ice storage qualifies for investment tax credits worth up to 50% of project cost for construction starting by 2032.

🏗 Developers: Thirteen states have TEN laws and utilities need host neighborhoods. Early projects get the grant money.

💰 CFOs: Nostromo's Beverly Hilton system earns wholesale market revenue on top of the peak charges it avoids.

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