Some are thinking a bunch of electric vehicles plugged into the power grid are going to help level off the midday peak demand problem. Might even be worth promoting, *IF* you didn’t lose a big fraction of that energy going (back into the grid) and coming (putting your battery back to its previous state of charge —except that it’s now a little closer to being worn out).

Managing the peak demand problem by time-shifting some demand away from that midday peak makes a lot more sense. Things like HVAC units, clothes driers, water heaters, battery charging stations for vehicles can (in many cases) be idled or turned down for a couple hours or so out of 24, without much adverse impact.

Most modern personal computers have some flexibility in terms of power versus perfomance —more so than a typical clothes drier. It might help if personal computers (and some mainframes) had some sort of time-of-day scheduling for that tradeoff.