Some local radio ads from the power company suggest you can save money by operating large appliances at off-peak hours. Ok, but how does that save the consumer money? With just a plain old analog meter on most homes, does the power company charge different rates during peak hours? (If so, how do they meter it?)
They install a special meter which keeps track of your usage during peak and non-peak hours. They charge a different rate for each.
Yes, they can determine useage in off-peak hours. The real savings is that the grid is not overworked as much in peak hours, so the energy is better utilized by all customers.
The claim is mostly bogus unless you get a meter capable of dealing with time.
With a regular meter you can argue that they won’t have to use as much higher cost peak load generators, so the added surcharge for everybody is less. I’m sure you can see this doesn’t really do you that much good. It depends on almost all the people deciding to offset peak load to get the surcharge reduced for you.