Dual metered electric

Problems: Electric companies have to manage to peak demand, causing them to build excess capacity, buy excess capacity, and use more expensive and dirtier resources to meet peak demand. Peak demand occurs during the day when people are at work, school and home at the same time. This, combined with peak heat during summer days is what bends and breaks our systems. There is no ability or incentive to shift any of these demands. Also, electric cars are not close to being economically feasible, so they need to have another way of making their owner money other than gas savings.

Solutions: Have dual power rates, one during higher demand times (such as 9am to 5pm) and thus allow users to make intelligent economic decisions. Most people would put off dish washing, laundry and other items until the night to save some money and hot showers are mostly taken in the morning anyway. An industry would grow up around this to create consumer storage devices (batteries) that could be charged during cheap energy hours at night and used during the most expensive times during the day. If the regulators also forced energy companies to buy back stored energy at a midpoint between the cheap night rates and the higher day rates, people and business would quickly adopt technologies to take advantage of this and help the electric companies avoid build-out for peak demand. Also imagine that you have a fully electric car that you can charge up at night and let the energy company buy back juice if you leave the car in the garage for the day or have more energy than you need to go back and forth to work. Along the same lines, energy companies could borrow energy from your electric car during some peak moments in the day as long as they "paid you back" before you had to commute home.

Unlike most of my ideas, this one is not completely original and I have heard bits and pieces and used them to fuse a good solution here.