Comment by crmd

If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.

Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.

I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.

Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.