Making dumb appliances smart

When I was a kid, I loved the game of Tetris. Falling blocks would cover my screen as I desperately tried to avoid those pesky gaps. Inevitably as the falling blocks sped up, the number of gaps would increase until it was game over.?

Now this analogy might be a stretch, but imagine electricity use in the home like a game of Tetris. The top of your screen is the maximum that you can stack your blocks, in your home this limit is the electrical panel. Imagine that?each different block in Tetris is an electrical appliance in your home, such as the electric stove that turns on when you cook, the electric HVAC, and your electric vehicle charger. If you stack each block, one on top of the other, you will inevitably hit the ceiling and the game will be over.

Reaching this ceiling is the same as reaching the limits of your electrical panel. If you simply stack each of these blocks on top of each other, you will quickly lose the game without taking advantage of all the open space left.

When it comes to your home’s electric capacity, the solutions of today simply stack these “blocks” or appliance loads, on top of each other. To keep the game going, we default to increasing the height of the ceiling so we can fit more blocks.

But what if there is a more efficient way to use up the extra space???

With the introduction of load management, these “blocks” of energy are now dynamic in their abilities.

Imagine the possibilities of a system that could automatically shift a block to optimize for the fit of another block. The moment another block starts to drop, load management again shifts energy to optimize the use of the space that would otherwise be unused by the “stacking” method. Instead of upping the size of our panels (Tetris screens) constantly, block orientation becomes automated to our needs for that game (day) – this is the power of load management! Your current appliances that draw a fixed amount of electricity become flexible in nature, controllable based on the total energy usage within the home or price signals of electricity or utility congestion. Imagine the power!