What “Load Shifting” Actually Means

Read the following questions and decide whether your answer would be Yes or No:

• Do you want to pay less for energy without using less?

• Do you want to be able to use more power at once without tripping your breaker?

• Do you want to use more sustainable energy and reduce strain on the grid?

You’d probably answer yes to all of those (if you wouldn’t, we aren’t sure exactly why but think you should also keep reading). All of these things sound great, almost magical: how are you supposed to pay less and install more power-hungry devices without having to pay more for energy and replace your panel? 

The answer is load shifting.

If you are familiar with the concept, there’s a chance you’ve filed it away in your mind as “boring electrification term”, and if you aren’t familiar with it, there’s a chance the name alone sounds like a boring electrification term — which it sort of is. But it’s also very useful and increasingly easy to implement.

What is a “load” and how is it shifted?

To keep things simple, a load is any device or appliance that uses electricity: your TV, your iPhone charger, your dishwasher. Just like your appliances have physical weight, they also have a “weight” on the grid — meaning they all use different amounts of energy.

What’s load shifting, then? 

Think about the last time you did a big grocery run and ended up with something like 4 or 5 bags. Each bag weighs a certain amount. You could take all the bags in at once, or you could spread them out over a few different trips to make things easier on yourself. It’s also possible that the combined weight of your bags is too heavy for you to physically carry all at once — and you, or at least your arms, would collapse if you tried.

So, you choose to take multiple trips — or in other words, spread out the load. 

If you understand that analogy, you understand load shifting. The goal of load shifting is to smooth out your energy usage in efficient ways, usually to 1. Save you money, 2. Put less stress on your home’s electrical system, and 3. Reduce the burden on the electrical grid.

Today, the average person is not load shifting. Instead, their usage looks more like this:

But, if the average person (or you!) were able to implement load shifting, their usage graph would look something more like this: smooth and efficient.

This sounds wonderful, and of course if it were as easy as flipping a switch there we wouldn't need so many demand response and time of use programs, energy would be easier to generate and plan for, and our energy consumption might be substantially cleaner on the whole.

Good news is, load shifting in your home is a lot easier today than it used to be.

A few helpful ways you can load shift in your home

For most of the time that electricity has been widely available, the only way to do load shifting in your home was the obvious way — manually. You had to think through how much electricity each of your appliances use, then intentionally space them out so your usage never spiked. Not fun at all, and not feasible for most people who aren’t able to be home at 11:30AM, for example, to turn on the dishwasher so they don’t need to use it at night.

There wasn’t much benefit to doing this in the past, anyway. Until pretty recently, there’s not been any real need or incentive to be conscientious of how much energy we’re using — or when we use it. 

However, as the average American got more appliances and our lives became increasingly powered by electricity, the demand for that energy has grown. In response, incentive and rewards programs like time-of-use rates and demand response have given us some reason to at least try load shifting. 

Alongside those incentives are emerging technologies that take the highly manual task of load shifting, and make it just a little easier:

• Smart splitters: Companies like Neocharge make smart splitters, which plug into your existing outlets and allow you to intelligently manage how much energy your EV charger uses, alongside your other appliances. This can help you avoid a panel upgrade, which can cost thousands. 

• Smart panels: A smart splitter is nice — but a smart panel, like the one from SPAN, takes load shifting to a new level. Instead of having to manage everything at the circuit and appliance level, smart panels give you control over your entire home and can do most of the load shifting work on their own. These are control centers that let you turn things on and off, set preferences, be more efficient, and more.

• Battery-powered appliances: There’s a growing list of electric appliances, like the heat pump from Harvest Thermal or the induction stove we make at Impulse, that harvest energy when it’s cheapest and most efficient, then store that energy in a battery to be used later. We’re biased, but we like this idea best because you never need to change your behavior or even think about load shifting: use your appliances however and whenever you want, and we’ll make sure that the load shifting is happening automatically through our battery. 

Load shifting no longer needs to be a boring, inconvenient idea. With the technology that’s available now (and that will continue to come out in the future), load shifting is both accessible and a genuinely good idea.

What the future of load shifting looks like

It’s one of those crisp early autumn mornings; you wake up to the first of the candy-yellow leaves falling outside your window. During the night, your stove was charging. Then your heat pump. Then your car. When you go downstairs to make breakfast, you aren’t pulling from a stressed grid — you’re using electricity that was harvested at off-peak hours. A few hours after you head out to work, your smart panel and smart appliances are harvesting off-peak electricity again for the evening hours. By the time you get home, you can do whatever you want without putting stress on the grid (or paying for more expensive electricity).

Cleaner, smoother, more affordable, and finally, feasible. Load shifting is just another powerful way smart panels, and smart electric appliances, can get you — and everyone — to a better future. If you want to learn more about the Impulse stove, click here.