This needs central coordination to really work. You also need customer incentives to get buy in.
Power companies do something similar with air conditioning units in hot areas. Customers can opt-in to have a control module installed that modulates their A/C on and off at peak loads to control demand. Customers get some nominal discount on their bill for participating.
Worked better when people weren’t working from home and it didn’t matter if your house was a bit warmer than normal for an hour or two mid-day.
Controlling this on end devices introduces a lot of distributed systems problems, like stampeding herd when all of the devices switch back on. You could try jittered back off and such, but cold customers would just unplug and replug until it worked.
Power companies do something similar with air conditioning units in hot areas. Customers can opt-in to have a control module installed that modulates their A/C on and off at peak loads to control demand. Customers get some nominal discount on their bill for participating.
Worked better when people weren’t working from home and it didn’t matter if your house was a bit warmer than normal for an hour or two mid-day.
Controlling this on end devices introduces a lot of distributed systems problems, like stampeding herd when all of the devices switch back on. You could try jittered back off and such, but cold customers would just unplug and replug until it worked.