![\"High-voltage](\"https:\/\/images.seattletimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/03172026_1_151839.jpg?d=780x520\")
By Greg Kim<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Climate Lab<\/a> is a Seattle Times initiative that explores the effects of climate change in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The project is funded in part by The Bullitt Foundation, CO2 Foundation, Jim and Birte Falconer, Mike and Becky Hughes, Henry M. Jackson Foundation, Martin-Fabert Foundation, Craig McKibben and Sarah Merner, Mary Snapp and Spencer Frazer, University of Washington and Walker Family Foundation, and its fiscal sponsor is the Seattle Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At 6 p.m. on a recent chilly Tuesday, Jim Sullivan\u2019s thermostat in his Maple Valley home automatically turned down to 60 degrees \u2014 not because he set it, but because his utility adjusted it down 4 degrees during a \u201crush hour\u201d event of high energy demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years, utilities across the state \u2014 including Seattle City Light, PSE, Snohomish County PUD and Tacoma Power \u2014 have introduced one or more \u201cdemand response\u201d programs like this that incentivize customers to shift their electricity use by a few hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remotely controlled thermostats like Sullivan\u2019s. Water heaters that warm up before people get home from work. Electric vehicles set to charge at night. Home batteries that supply power to the grid in certain hours. Variable rates for electricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their proliferation reflects just how thin the margins between supply and demand for power in the Pacific Northwest have become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For most of the state\u2019s history, Washingtonians never had to be stingy with their electricity use. But Washington\u2019s hydropower dams are \u201cpretty much tapped out<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within the broader risk of an energy shortage, there\u2019s another more nuanced story. Both the supply and demand of electricity are getting spikier \u2014 the peaks and valleys of usage and generation spreading further apart \u2014 and that could upend the economics of delivering power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Utilities, facing pressure over rising rates and affordability concerns, are asking customers to help them manage the costs of increasingly expensive spikes by using less at certain times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Demand response programs can\u2019t solve the broader problem of needing more electricity overall, but experts say even small reductions during peaks can significantly reduce costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But utilities will have to navigate a tricky balancing act \u2014 cutting costs as much as they can without upsetting customers who expect control over their switches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Energy usage has always spiked in the morning hours before people go to work and in the evening when they come home. But now, more people are heating their homes with electric heat pumps, cooking with induction stoves and charging their vehicles after their commutes. Those can drive not only more overall demand, but higher peaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the other end of the equation, clean energy mandates are replacing the steady hum of greenhouse gas emitting power plants with renewables like wind and solar, often called \u201cintermittent\u201d resources in the utility industry because they come and go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Making matters worse, peaks in demand can coincide with dips in supply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in 2024, when millions of homes in the Pacific Northwest turned up the heat all at once during a severe cold snap. More than ever, they used electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces. At the same time, wind power dropped to a near-standstill<\/a>, which can often happen during extremely hot or cold high-pressure systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The region\u2019s utilities didn\u2019t have the power on hand so they bought it from other places like Canada and the Southwestern United States<\/a>. With so much competition, prices surged to around $1,000 per megawatt hour, more than 10 times normal levels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Events like this used to be rare. Not anymore. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Utilities are worried about costs surging even higher as the Northwest faces an energy shortage<\/a> during extreme conditions starting this year, forecast to get significantly worse by 2030, partly driven by the rapid build-out of data centers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through programs to reduce demand, Seattle City Light aims to cut its consumption by about 50 megawatts during peak hours, about 2.5% of its maximum load. State laws require investor-owned utilities like Puget Sound Energy to have programs that can reduce peak loads by 10%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If successful, City Light could theoretically save about $50,000 per hour and PSE $500,000 per hour if those reductions resulted in buying that much less wholesale power during the most expensive periods. Those estimates are under the most extreme conditions and doesn\u2019t include incentivization costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daniel Kirschen, an energy market expert at the University of Washington, said demand response programs can both reduce the power utilities have to buy and lower wholesale electricity prices overall, somewhat dramatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Utilities can also potentially avoid or delay building new infrastructure and power generation that sits unused for all but a few days out of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sullivan said he hardly notices the effects of his thermostat adjusting automatically except for a few times a year in the summer when his home gets too hot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All but two of the 70 people who responded to a recent Seattle Times questionnaire who had tried demand response programs or time-of-use rates said they supported them. The financial incentives were negligible, many said, but they wanted to chip in on sustainability efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMaybe you can reduce the amount of energy that society needs to generate. And if it means that I might be a little hot some days, OK,\u201d Sullivan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Utilities aren\u2019t yet close to getting a critical mass of customers to sign up and stay enrolled. Less than 10% of PSE customers have opted into incentivized programs, less than a fifth of the way to its target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a Seattle City Light pilot of a remote thermostat program, people overrode their temperature in about 20% of events, and 15% of people disenrolled altogether, although half were because they moved. The utility said 94% of participants surveyed at the end said they were satisfied or very satisfied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tacoma Power said it received very few complaints while it ran a pilot program in 2022 that remotely warmed up people\u2019s water heaters an hour or two before they returned home from their commutes. But a report produced by the utility showed a third of customers who volunteered to participate opted out in the second year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Setting electric vehicles to charge at night can be one of the most impactful ways for individuals to help the grid, and demand response programs pay customers to do so. But many customers say there aren\u2019t a lot of electricity uses that they can shift to other hours. And low-income people, who are more likely to work in person, may have more trouble making a shift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s one reason Seattle City Light is keeping its time-of-use rates, which will charge different prices for electricity depending on the time, voluntary. Participants will pay 16.7 cents per kilowatt-hour during peak hours between 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. versus 8.4 cents in off-peak hours from midnight to 6 a.m., which a pilot showed could save customers $144 per year compared to normal rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some homeowners who are used to complete control over their appliances are steering clear of these programs altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I just don\u2019t want Big Brother or Puget Sound Energy deciding when I should be warm and when I should be cold because they can\u2019t produce enough electricity,\u201d said Alan Smith, a PSE customer in Skagit County.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All Sullivan has to do to override his thermostat during \u201crush hour\u201d events is to hit the up button to increase the temperature. If he didn\u2019t have this ability, it\u2019d be a \u201cnonstarter,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Control is a delicate issue with demand response programs. Utilities need to know how much they can rely on reduced demand, especially in extreme conditions when both the financial stakes and the temptation to override limits are highest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Washington, most demand response programs and time-of-use rates are voluntary and easy to override. That\u2019s not the case everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Maryland, where the grid is at greater risk of brownouts and rolling blackouts, participants in one utility\u2019s program are not allowed to override their air conditioner<\/a> during emergency events and have a limited number of overrides during nonemergency events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Benton County, Washington, where two data center campuses are being proposed, all residential customers pay a \u201cdemand charge<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a fee based on their highest electricity use during peak hours \u2014 and can\u2019t opt out. A Nevada utility is reportedly facing backlash<\/a> from customers over a similar program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kurt Miller, executive director at the nonprofit Northwest Public Power Association, said while demand response works better with more utility control, utilities should be careful about making programs mandatory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe do have to know that people are sensitive about how much control a utility has over their stuff,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an interesting report for some details listed, even though the Seattle Times is a propaganda outfit. One is their push to heat pumps is negatively impacting their ability to deliver electricity during peak events, so you’d think natural gas for heating would be a better option. And the number of people that leave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weather","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16385,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16384\/revisions\/16385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Maple](\"https:\/\/images.seattletimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/03182026_thermostat_150538.jpg?d=780x863\")
![\"Snow](\"https:\/\/images.seattletimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/03182026_snow_150206.jpg?d=780x538\")
Why now?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How much could it save? <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How uncomfortable is it?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Voluntary or mandatory<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n