The power grid may start scheduling your sleep

A multi-year research programme into household demand flexibility has reached the part of the analysis that everyone anticipated and nobody wanted to write down. If electricity pricing continues to vary by the hour, and if households continue to respond to price, then over a long enough period the price signal does not merely move appliances. It moves people.

The mechanism is unremarkable. Cheap hours attract the washing machine first, then the dishwasher, then the car, then the water heater. Each shift is individually trivial. But a household whose machines all run between one and four in the morning is a household that has quietly relocated part of its evening, and the researchers note that a person tends to follow their laundry.

Under the scenarios modelled, midday would become the cheapest period in sunny regions and the small hours in windy ones, producing a continent on which the economically rational bedtime differs by several hours depending on local meteorology. The programme's authors describe this, with visible reluctance, as a coordination problem with a biological component.

“We would not be telling anyone when to sleep,” a spokesperson for the programme would say. “We would be telling them when electricity is cheap. Historically, people have found this information more persuasive than any sleep advice they have ever received from a doctor.”

Sleep researchers consulted by the programme would raise the obvious objection. Human circadian rhythm is entrained by light and is stubbornly indifferent to tariffs, and a population that shifts its waking hours toward cheap electricity rather than toward daylight would accumulate the kind of chronic misalignment already documented in shift workers.

The proposed mitigation is almost touching in its modesty: a protected overnight band in which prices would not be allowed to fall below a floor, removing the incentive to be awake at four for financial reasons. It would be, in effect, a tariff designed to protect sleep, and it would be the first piece of energy regulation written primarily for a biological reason.

None of this is policy. It is a modelling exercise with a long appendix. But time-of-use pricing already exists, smart meters already exist, and the first generation to grow up with an app that says cheapest energy in forty minutes is currently in primary school.